Perth photographer Lainey Tess Quinn capturing city’s darkest corners through Abandoned World Photography

A fascination with macabre derelict buildings drives photographer Lainey Tess Quinn to jump fences and clamber through broken windows to capture the strange beauty of Perth’s urban decay. Welcome to the fringe world of urbex, short for urban exploration, in which enthusiasts locate abandoned buildings and venture inside to capture surroundings that often would not look out of place in a horror movie. Quinn has been immersed in this for more than a decade, infiltrating more than 350 deserted sites across the globe, including in her homeland of Ireland. “For some reason, climbing through a broken window of jagged glass and jumping down into the grand hall of a mental asylum from the 1800s or climbing over triple-spiked fences to explore the inside of an army ammunition fort gives me a serious thrill,” she said. “It challenges me, scares me and forces me to push my own boundaries time after time. It’s truly beautiful to see history frozen in time and I feel like I’m documenting the past by capturing it in photography.” But for Quinn its not simply a case of making her way in and snapping a picture, she also acts as something of an amateur historian to give people a complete story about the buildings she photographs. “I put a lot of time and research into the process from start to finish and I love every bit of it,” she said. “Firstly, I research an area and select buildings of interest. “I then visit the sites and find access points into the buildings, after which I photograph and document the inside of them. I am very selective about the buildings I choose to photograph. They need to have historical significance to them whether they be hospitals, asylums, schools, aged care homes, prisons or religious sites.” Breaking into abandoned buildings in Perth can be hazardous and is illegal. Offenders risk criminal charges for trespassing. And there are other dangers suich as asbestos, unstable structures, squatters and dirty needles. “You really need to watch your footing walking around the sites,” Quinn said. She recently photographed the old Princess Margaret Hospital site before developers raze all trace of its existence. “I love that it dates back to 1909 and the story about how it was established,” she said. “Perth businessman Charles Moore was given threepence from a young girl, who asked for it to be put towards a children’s hospital. After 12 years of fundraising and lobbying efforts, the girl’s wish came true in 1909 when the hospital opened to the public.” Quinn also recently photographed the Swan District Hospital site, which closed in 2015 and has been extensively damaged by vandals. She said the stories from the hospital were equally fascinating, and disturbing. “In particular, the 2000 missing case of Sarah Anne McMahon interests me, as the last piece of evidence the police found belonging to Sarah was her car that was parked in the hospital carpark,” she said. The site has been committed to the Noongar Boodja Trust, under the South West Native Title Settlement, with plans to establish an aged care facility. There’s one place that Quinn will never return to, a house on Milne Street in Bayswater she’s dubbed the spookiest in Perth. “There are very few buildings that I would deliberately go out of my way not to return to, and this house is definitely on that list,” she said. “You know when you can’t shake a spooky feeling? The feeling that makes you want to run? Well, both times I visited this place, I wanted to run every second I spent inside. “I can’t find much history online about this place, although someone did say it used to be a wagon wheel manufacturer.”