Grays Consolidated

In most places, graffiti told me which singers rock the best (*NSYNC seemed to be the consensus) or who ♥s whom. In Grays Consolidated, an abandoned high school in Grays, South Carolina, the medium relayed a different message. The intense feelings of the town's young people were visible not just in the graffiti but also in the ways the school has been torn apart: by shotgun blasts to light fixtures and fists punched through walls. The front doors of the school were wide open, and there were no signs posted to warn people away—as if the town's adults had permitted their children to unleash whatever they had inside them on an institution that once embodied the future of Grays.