Everything in Athens is probably a good example. Any time when there really isn't a need for these facilities in these cities, but they get built anyway for the games, everybody has kind of wishful thinking about what the afterlife of these spaces is going to be. If there is not demand for it before the Olympics, there's probably not going to be demand for it afterwards.

In some bigger cities, I don't think people really realize these structures were built for the Olympics.

Like for Putin it's really about hosting this two-week [Olympic] party and showing it off to the world.It's a pride thing. It's a big PR exercise for him and for Russia. So, at that point $50 billion and some environmental damage and a small city's future don't really matter.

Every city and country just has a different reason for wanting to host the [Olympic] games.

So many people that we met had some sort of connection to the [Olympics] games. Some story about how they volunteered there, or some sort of memory of it. It still is in the cultural memory and identity of these cities as much as it is in the physical and architectural memory. It's where these two things overlap, I think, that we're trying to explore with the photos.

Smaller cities, places like Sarajevo, for example, even amid all that destruction there's still so much pride that the [Olympic] games were there and that they did it.

We were talking to shop owners or ordinary people who were living in these buildings now. A lot of the Olympic Villages were turned into housing.