Both Emily Zeller and her photographs are well-traveled. Her photographic talents have taken her to some unusual places--old prisons, paper mills, and munitions plants--and have landed her work on the pages of the New York Times.

During her junior year, Zeller's photos of slacklining, a new campus craze, appeared in the "Education Life" section of the Times. A few months later, she received a surprise call asking her to photograph decorated student residence-hall doors. That request resulted in her second Times placement in less than a year.

A lthough the pictures of student-life trends gave her work national exposure, Zeller is most fascinated with subjects that are much less trendy: she is drawn to abandoned industrial sites.

A senior English and studio art major, Zeller records the stories of "big, old factories that have been around for over a hundred years and then just closed." Along with groups of like-minded individuals who visit abandoned structures all over the Midwest and East--always, she cautions, with permission--she has explored a side of America's industrial past rarely seen by the public.

Zeller uses her Canon digital SLR to document a way of life that has been disappearing. "I'll find lunch boxes, or correspondence papers, or bits of tools," she says. "Sometimes, it's like the workers just left." Discussions with security guards, often the only workers left behind, have also shed light on the past. "Industry is such a big part of our history," Zeller comments, "and now we're going away from it."

In her upcoming senior art show, Zeller plans to tell the stories of these nearly-forgotten places through both words and pictures. And, with her storyteller's eye, she hopes to enroll in a master's of fine arts program to further hone her photographic skills.