Forgotten Cowfolk, Alayne Ballantine, 2024, instant photograph, 4 x 4 in. / 10.16 x 10.16 cm.

Haunted by Ruins: Cyanotypes of Six Flags by Alayne Ballantine

July 8, 2025 Gavin Coates

Featured image: Forgotten Cowfolk, Alayne Ballantine, 2024, instant photograph, 4 x 4 in. / 10.16 x 10.16 cm.

Alayne Ballantine’s cyanotype series conjures the poetic ruins of Six Flags New Orleans through ghostly, fabric-bound Polaroid transfers.

Alayne Ballantine uses instant film and cyanotype on cloth to explore memory, ruin, and abandoned American spaces through experimental photographic processes.

Each 12 x 12 inch cyanotype is a quiet invocation of place, memory, and abandonment, fixed in deep indigo hues and the soft grain of cloth. Working with instant film and historical photographic processes, Ballantine captures the melancholic energy of a once boisterous amusement park, now stilled and overtaken by time. Her use of cyanotype on fabric echoes the vulnerability and impermanence of her subject, inviting us to confront the layered aftermath of disaster, nostalgia, and cultural decay.

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Guard House, Alayne Ballantine, 2024, cyanotype print on cloth, 12 x 12 in. / 30.48 x 30.48 cm.

Guard House anchors the series with an image of a deserted structure framed in spectral white chain links. The tension between containment and exposure is palpable; the building stands alone yet surrounded by a visual motif of captivity. The cyanotype’s high contrast treatment makes the chains glow, transforming them into symbols of both memory’s grip and society’s abandonment. Ballantine’s cloth substrate adds texture that amplifies the tactile absence, this is not just a place lost, but one imprisoned by time.

Entry Way, Alayne Ballantine, 2024, cyanotype print on cloth, 12 x 12 in. / 30.48 x 30.48 cm.

In Entry Way, Ballantine captures a slanted architectural fragment beneath a decaying overpass. The tilted horizon and oppressive shadows suggest collapse not just of infrastructure, but of optimism. Here, the cyanotype feels almost like bruised skin, wrinkled, uneven, and fading. There is a sense of the viewer being shut out, left to contemplate what remains when a gate no longer welcomes anyone. The work’s emotional resonance lies in its stillness, an elegy to an entrance that no longer leads anywhere.

Dock, Alayne Ballantine, 2024, instant photography cyanotype on cloth, 12 x 12 in. / 30.48 x 30.48 cm.

Dock completes the triptych with a long view down a wooden path stretching into water, framed by dissolving bursts of light and fluid, chemical edges. The faded dock, surrounded by lush growth and still water, becomes an allegory for transition, between past and present, ruin and reflection. Unlike the other two, this image breathes more freely. The sense of openness here offers quiet redemption, a reminder that even in abandonment, nature and time reclaim beauty.

Together, Ballantine’s cyanotypes form a portrait of post-human space where joy once echoed. Her fusion of instant photography and alternative printing imbues each scene with a spectral presence, reminding us how quickly leisure turns to loss. These works are not just about Six Flags, they are about what it means to remember, to mourn, and to find form in the formless.

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