Hudson Valley Ruins Photo Exhibit Opens at NYS Museum

The New York State Museum has opened “Hudson Valley Ruins,” a photography and architecture exhibition.

On display through December 31, 2017, the exhibition features over 80 photographs by Robert Yasinsac and Thomas Rinaldi documenting forgotten historic sites and cultural treasures in the Hudson River Valley.

The exhibition is based on Yasinsac and Rinaldi’s 2006 book, Hudson Valley Ruins: Forgotten Landmarks of an American Landscape. In addition to great river estates, the book and exhibition profiles sites meaningful to everyday life in the Hudson Valley: churches, hotels, commercial and civic buildings, mills, and train stations. The exhibition explores many of these abandoned places and also revisits several sites that have changed in the past ten years since the book’s publication.

Working together since meeting in 1999, Yasinsac and Rinaldi have photographed more than 500 sites throughout the region. First photographing sites around their childhood homes, they gradually worked farther afield, eventually expanding their scope to cover the entire region between Yonkers and the Capital District. Driven by a sense of urgency to document sites of architectural or cultural significance that seemed poised to disappear, the pair also found beauty in the picturesque decay of these places.

The State Museum is a program of the New York State Education Department’s Office of Cultural Education. For information about programs and events, visit the Museum website or  call (518) 474-5877.

Photos: New York Trap Rock Co., Verplanck, Westchester County, April 9, 2005 by Thomas Rinaldi, and Wyndclyffe, Rhinebeck, Dutchess County, February 28, 2003 by Robert Yasinsac.