The big picture: Bryan Sansivero’s abandoned dollhouses

The project, which he’d been working on for more than a decade, had taken him all over the US in search of “the most interesting, unusual, and colourful [abandoned] houses I could find”. Grand, decaying exteriors with turrets and balconies ticked his boxes, as did interiors “filled with vintage items that bring a feeling of nostalgia and loss”. Sansivero was just as also interested in piecing together the stories of former residents as he was in documenting the eerie tableaux they’d left behind.

He got more eeriness than he bargained for in Smyth County. The house, which he’d spotted earlier on Google Maps, was in a busy neighbourhood and it looked so dilapidated that he couldn’t imagine there was much left inside. The front door was wide open. On the ground floor he encountered an old bicycle and some large toy cars. Then he ventured upstairs and came upon this devastated room crowded with tin dollhouses. Part of the house was swaying, he recalls; with every step he took, the floor would move. An old woman’s portrait glowered at him from the wall to his right as he captured the scene on his medium-format camera.

Why did someone chose to fill their home in this way? And what led to its dereliction? For all its creepiness, it’s not an isolated case: there are more than 15 million abandoned houses in the US, a figure that speaks to the ravages wrought by deindustrialisation in places such as Smyth County, among other factors. Th is image and others in Sansivero’s book prompt us to consider the fate of all of our homes. “It doesn’t matter how large your house is, we decay all the same,” Sansivero writes in the introduction, noting that the little things we hold dear – dollhouses, toy cars and the rest – “will come and go, like those of others before us”. 

America the Abandoned: Captivating Portraits of Deserted Homes by Bryan Sansivero is published by Artisan Books on 6 November