There’s something extra eerie about places that are not quite abandoned just yet, but edging closer and closer to a prolonged death process. Relics of another time, these architectural remnants feel like physical connections to all the lives that passed through them, many of which have already met an end. Lacking any efforts to preserve or revive them, they slowly crumble, waiting for their inevitable demolition. Photographer Michael Eastman specializes in capturing such places on film in all their deteriorating glory.

“These empty rooms are really portraits of the people that inhabited them,” says Eastman. “It’s for us as the viewer to figure out from the arrangement of the furniture, the things on the walls, the kinds of things that they’ve chosen to surround themselves with, the condition of the house, to kind of build our own portrait of who that is.”

The self-taught photographer has spent five decades documenting interiors and facades in cities like Rome, Paris, Havana and New Orleans – all of which happen to have similar qualities in terms of color, character and a rich sense of history. Chromogenic 4×5-inch film, a wide-angle lens and long exposure times allow Eastman to reproduce the vivid hues in each scene without the use of artificial light, resulting in painterly compositions that feel like you could step right into them.

A selection of Eastman’s photographs are currently on display at the JL Modern Gallery in Palm Beach, Florida through February 23rd.

“In a historical sense, Michael Eastman’s work arises from a history of photographers renowned for their preservation of culture. Many of the buildings pictured will cease to exist; whether crumbling Beaux Arts or Colonial structures or ones that have become subsequently removed or renovated, Eastman’s work in Lisbon, Buenos Aires, and especially Havana, present an intimate yet distant portrait of a place and its history,” says JL Modern Gallery of the show.

“Eastman’s contemporary photographs are in the tradition of Atget’s preservation of Paris, Walker-Evans documentation of the American South, and Berenice Abbott’s “Changing Times of New York” project. The images activate an explorative quest that the viewer can enter to understand the history of the human experience of the past.”

“Michael Eastman’s grand photographs appeal to a myriad of collectors for many reasons. Most importantly, they resonate with the uniqueness that our collective lives have made on transforming both the places we live and interact in as well as the furniture and personal effects that are products of our civilization. The photographs, steeped in nostalgia and a time gone by, are remnants and evidence of the continuity of our collective lives.”

Check out WebUrbanist’s 2010 interview with Eastman on his striking series, “Vanishing America.”

Surreal and at times a bit eerie, a rainbow road made of pure light winds through muted landscapes as if illuminating a path to another world. As it makes its way through snowy forests, across rocky creeks and along the seashore before pausing within an abandoned shed, it almost seems alive. For filmmaker and photographer Daniel Mercadante, there’s a sense of hope to it, a narrative that only becomes apparent when you see all of the images in the series on his Instagram. “When the journey felt long and lonely, can you remember you’re on the Rainbow Road?”

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The rainbow first appears in a dark and mysterious forest. It travels throughout the many diverse landscapes of California, skips all the way down to the lush jungles and weathered alleyways of Guatemala, reappears briefly on the West Coast and then finds its way to Connecticut before encircling Mercadante’s wife and creative partner, Katina Mercadante, in celebration of their anniversary.

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The project is a gorgeous example of just how magical long-exposure photography can be. It’s so simple to make – you just wave sources of light against a darkened backdrop while keeping the camera shutter open longer than usual – yet it seems to open a portal to another universe. Check out the Mercadantes’ Instagram to see the whole journey, or their website for their collaborative film projects.

The strange glowing figures in these images are so complex, you might think they’re screenshots from a digital animation, or created in Photoshop – but there’s no computer-based trickery here. Just the same long exposure techniques light artists have been using for decades to create and capture ethereal compositions, albeit applied in an unusually creative manner.

Hannu Huhtamo’s bizarre shapes glow against twilight landscapes and abandoned interiors, often looking somewhere between a plant and an alien insect. They sprout up in snowy fields, appear from inside giant teacups at theme parks or take shape in darkened living rooms.

A musician by training and hobbyist photographer, the Finnish artist first experimented with lighting techniques when taking promotional photos for a death metal band and deciding he wanted a long-exposure pentagram made with the flame of a lighter. Years later, when he met light artist Janne Parviainen and got a look at his work, Huhtamo decided to revisit the technique from a new angle.

All of his work is created ‘SOOC’ or straight out of the camera, and he uses no special light equipment other than El-Wire (electroluminescent wire) and modified LED flash lights. “Darkness is my canvas and the light is my brush,” he says in this behind-the-scenes video produced by Great Big Story.

It’s almost a cliche at this point to highlight the beauty that can be found in everyday items, like that scene in the movie ‘American Beauty’ where Wes Bentley and Thora Birch stare at a plastic bag waving around on a sidewalk like it’s the Mona Lisa. But sometimes, it just can’t be helped. Have you ever gazed at a traffic light and marveled at the accidental art it was producing? You’re about to.

Being such a humble and unremarkable object, installed at countless intersections in countless cities, the traffic signal is an unlikely subject of the internet’s flighty attentions, but the magic here is really in photographer Lucas Zimmermann’s vision – and in the fog that clings to the town of Weimar, Germany.

Zimmermann first captured his ‘Traffic Lights’ series on a particularly hazy night, noting that the light streaming from the red, yellow and green lamps was stretching out into rainbows. He wondered how the effect would be enhanced by long-exposure photography, and the results show the streams of light almost seeming to take physical form.

“I have been waiting for two long years to finally go out again and progress on my traffic lights series,” says Zimmermann. “It was worth the wait.”

The new addition to the series is just as striking as the first, supporting Zimmerman’s belief that photography can show us things we might otherwise overlook, “such as a simple traffic light on the street.”

Red neon lights arranged in geometric shapes or casting eerie illumination onto darkened trees almost seem like a natural phenomenon in the vein of the aurora borealis, captured by photographers who manage to be in the right place at the right time. A glow coming from a slit in a snowy landscape or just under the surface of the sea hints at the presence of life forms just out of sight.

‘La Linea Roja’ by photographer Nicolas RIVALS carries on a longstanding tradition of introducing artificial lights to natural spaces for high-impact temporary art installations, but adds a little something extra in the form of a strikingly limited color palette, moody skies, black lines of tree silhouettes and surprisingly natural-looking compositions.

The Paris-based photographer installed the lights in various landscapes while on a trip through Spain, capturing the effect using long-exposure photographs.

Here’s what RIVALS has to say about the series:

“A red line woven over a journey through Spain, to connect Man with nature. A red line to fix a moment of poetry. Unreal scenes which existed for a night to disappear in the morning. An installation left as a proposition to the natural world. A luminous harmony between will and chance. Between tribute and sacrilege. Between the beautiful and the range. An aesthetic research on shapes engaging in dialogue with an asymmetrical nature.”