We Live in Limbo: Aftermath Country by Sky Shuyang Zhuang.
All images by Sky Shuyang Zhuang At first, Aftermath Country was about what happens when industry leaves.
Photographer Sky Shuyang Zhuang began the project in West Virginia, looking at landscapes and communities shaped by industries that had disappeared or diminished. But the longer he photographed, the harder it became to describe these places simply as being left behind.
Something else was arriving.
Wind turbines appeared on the horizon. Nuclear infrastructure once considered economically obsolete was becoming valuable again. Land around power facilities was being assembled for data centres. Families were being offered money for homes they had occupied for decades. Places built around one industrial promise were preparing themselves for another.
The question changed.
Not simply what happens when industry leaves, but what happens when the next promise of prosperity arrives?
WHAT COMES AFTER.
Zhuang did not set out to photograph the arrival of another industrial era. That developed gradually.
He began noticing connections between West Virginia and Central New York, where he had previously lived. These were places where older industries had receded, but they were not static. Renewable energy, data centres and renewed demand for existing power infrastructure were beginning to alter the same landscapes.
The aftermath, he realised, was not necessarily an ending.
It could be the space between two systems.
“I wasn’t only photographing the aftermath of one industrial era; I was also watching the beginning of another.”
That shift sits at the centre of Aftermath Country.
LIVING IN LIMBO.
Salem Township, Pennsylvania, became a turning point for the project.
Zhuang initially travelled there because of the Susquehanna nuclear power plant. What he encountered around it was a community already being reshaped by proposed data centre development.
Properties were being purchased. Families were considering whether to sell. Others were waiting to discover what would happen to the land around them.
There he met Steve and Kelly St. Clair, who run Zeke’s Antiques. They hadn't bought their property, although much of the surrounding land had.
Steve described their position in four words:
“We live in limbo.”
For Zhuang, the sentence connected what had previously seemed like two different stories. Industrial decline and new development were not opposites. They were different moments in the same cycle.
THE PRICE OF A PLACE.
No single response comes from the people Zhuang has met.
Some see development as opportunity. A substantial property buyout can completely change a family’s financial position. Investment may bring employment and money into places that have watched older industries disappear.
Others see something being dismantled.
Residents have raised concerns about noise, pollution, years of construction and the transformation of rural landscapes. For families who have occupied the same land for generations, its value cannot necessarily be reduced to the price offered for it.
And those positions are not always mutually exclusive.
Someone can accept the money and still mourn the place they are leaving.
Someone else can refuse an extraordinary offer because the land means something that cannot be bought.
Zhuang deliberately avoids deciding which response is correct. The work lives in the uncomfortable territory between them: opportunity, loss, uncertainty and acceptance occupying the same landscape.
BEFORE IT EXISTS.
What does a data centre look like before it exists?
Often, it looks like nothing at all.
It looks like farmland. Houses. Forests. Small businesses. Backyards. Roads.
That is one of the most compelling ideas in Zhuang’s project. By the time the architecture arrives, a transformation may have been underway for years. Properties have been purchased. Families have decided to leave. Parcels of land have been assembled. The future of a place can be determined while its physical appearance remains almost completely unchanged.
Zhuang is interested in that moment. A place still looks like what it was.
But it is already becoming something else.
OLD POWER, NEW MONEY.
Three Mile Island carries the memory of another American industrial era.
Unit 2 became synonymous with the 1979 partial meltdown. The separate Unit 1 continued producing electricity until 2019, when it closed for economic reasons.
Now that infrastructure has taken on a new value.
Renamed the Crane Clean Energy Centre, Unit 1 is being restored under a twenty-year agreement with Microsoft, driven by the growing electricity demands of data centres.
Infrastructure belonging to one technological age is being revived to power another.
AFTERMATH COUNTRY.
There is a temptation to photograph places like these as either victims of decline or beneficiaries of progress.
Aftermath Country refuses both.
The more interesting territory is the space between them.
A family can receive enough money to change its life and still lose something irreplaceable. A power station can belong simultaneously to industrial history and the infrastructure of the digital future. A rural landscape can appear unchanged even after decisions have been made that will permanently alter it.
The work is not really about ruins.
And it is not really about data centres.
It is about the period when one idea of prosperity has exhausted itself, and another begins arriving with its own promises.
The buildings change. The industries change. The language of progress changes. The land remains.
And the people living on it are once again asked what progress is worth.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER.
Sky Shuyang Zhuang is a Washington, DC-based photographer working across documentary, photojournalism, portraiture and institutional photography. His work examines how social, economic and political forces shape everyday life, particularly within communities and landscapes undergoing transition. He is currently a Photography Intern with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and holds a Bachelor of Science in Photography from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, with a minor in Museum Studies.
Sky Shuyang Zhuang went looking for what American industry had left behind. Instead, he found communities living in limbo as the next industrial cycle approached.