Dave Conlon has a weird hobby. When he isn’t working as a marketing professional in Burlington, Ontario, he sneaks into abandoned buildings—homes, schools, churches and hotels—and takes pictures. He is fascinated by what happens to the detritus people leave behind. Conlon, who calls his hobby “urban exploration,” started his adventures over a decade ago and has travelled all over North America with his camera. We’ve published a collection of his mesmerizing photos in the upcoming April issue of Maclean’s. They show worlds frozen in time and the slow incursion of nature—weeds and dust and critters—into private spaces.
Conlon has occasionally been caught trespassing but always manages to sweet-talk his way out of charges. And while he acknowledges that breaking and entering is technically illegal, he follows a strict moral code: he never uses force to break into a place, he always removes photos from his website if the building’s owner asks him to, and he never steals anything (he once returned $7,000 he found stuffed into a mattress to the property’s owner). “I want to keep exploring Canada,” he says, “but I want to do it in peace.”
—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief
