Photos from the end of the world

A bunker being eroded by the Atlantic at Cap Breton. Picture: Reuben Wu

UK photographer Rueben Wu likes to shoot abandoned places.

Wu is a musician from UK electro band, Ladytron, whose fame has allowed him access to some places of the world few of us will ever get to see.

He says that he has become attracted to the "dark and hidden things which most people have forgotten about," he tells Gizmodo .

These places include a long abandoned research base in Norway's arctic archipelago of Svalbard, observatories in Chile's Atacama Desert, a series of coastal forts built by the Nazis along western Europe and Scandinavia between 1942-1945, sea forts along the English Channel built during World War II to monitor Nazi aircraft and "sound mirrors" built to detect early radar signals.

Wu says he is interested in shooting places where "humans don't belong".

World War II Nazi surveillance sea forts built by the British. Picture: Reuben Wu

These British sea-forts were built to spy on Nazi aircraft during World War II. Picture: Reuben Wu

"I was interested primarily in settlements in remote and extreme locations, the scarcity of light over winter and the strangeness of the landscape," he told travel blog The Island Review .

Svalbard in particular is not a place of comfort, he says. "It is the only place in the world where natural burial is illegal, as the environmental conditions mean that dead bodies simply will not decompose."

"Humans don't belong there and they can't survive without huge effort," he said. "I found that I had stopped thinking about life at home and had become completely absorbed by the environment - a bizarre sensory deprivation where I became unable to judge the existence of anything apart from the shape of my travelling companion in front of me."

An abandoned building in Barentsburg, Svalbard. Picture: Reuben Wu

Grave sites in Chile's Atacama Desert. Picture: Reuben Wu

Wu's obsession with abandoned places stems from the writing of JG Ballard, Philip K Dick and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and their stories and themes of "ruin, decay and time".
"I think abandoned buildings separate themselves from their original purpose of existence by the path of time," he said.
"They signify that everything will come to an end, and we only have a short time to look around before we die."
Check out some of Wu's photos below, or on his Facebook, blog and professional website, and next time, before you miss the train, remember how lucky we are not to be living at the end of the world.