18th Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest Travel
Abandoned Albania

This is an image of one of the hundreds of thousands of forgotten and abandoned military bunkers built all over Albania during the cold ward. These structures are scattered all over the countryside and feel completely disconnected from Albania's current reality. They create the feeling of being on another planet at a moment lost in time. For this reason, I tinted this photo in colors taken from a NASA photo of Mars. I wanted to recreate the foreign feeling of these artifacts from a time not so long ago, which somehow feels like another universe.

Photo Detail
Date Taken: 07.2019
Date Uploaded: 11.2020
Photo Location: Saranda, Albania
Copyright: © Laurence Unger