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Aaron Wells

Aaron Wells is a writer drawn to the overlooked corners of the built world: hotel corridors late at night, malls before they open, pools after closing, and the half-familiar places most people walk straight past.

Concrete ramps crossing and doubling back through the dark core of 1933, the former Shanghai slaughterhouse, with patterned windows glowing at the edges — Ramps doubling back through 1933 in Shanghai, built that year as the city abattoir, with ramps to move cattle and workers between floors. Photo: Aaron Wells

He is the author of Liminal Spaces and Liminal Spaces Photography, both published in November 2026. The first book grew out of a simple question with no good answer online: why does a lit, clean, ready room with nobody in it feel stranger than a ruin? The second grew out of the practical questions that follow: where these pictures are actually taken, when such places are empty, and how anyone can photograph them legally with the phone in their pocket. The answer is that the places in the internet's favorite eerie pictures are ordinary ones, open to anyone who turns up at the right hour.

The photographs on this site are figures from the two books, plus a few of his own, each credited beneath it and on the credits page. None was generated by AI, and the same is true of the books.

Elsewhere

Aaron Wells on Amazon.

Contact

For permissions, corrections, press copies or to suggest a place worth photographing: contact@liminalspacesbooks.com.