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Illegal parking |
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Found on the way home |
Artist Statement
When I go on my daily
walks, I am annoyed by the sheer amount of trash and litter that seems to be
flying around. Of course, it is unsafe to pick up trash with my bare hands, so
there’s not much I can do about it unless I get the proper equipment to do so. Instead,
I hope the distance between my lens and the garbage I photographed provides a full
picture of the garbage within a 15-mile radius of my house. For this project, I
went to a plaza with a grocery store, restaurants, and other amenities. The
high volume of people that go in and out every day was sure to generate plenty
of garbage to photograph, some of which I recognized from weeks and weeks ago. I
avoided photographing any notable street signs or other location markers to
keep these images anonymous. These caches of trash are not unique to this
location, I could go practically to any town in America and find similar piles
of garbage.
For my header image, I went with photographs of the
insides of garbage cans. Their varying contents and fullness intrigued me, telling
little stories of the people who came before. The chips and drinks from the restaurant,
the single bottle of a fruit smoothie outside the gym (no doubt much more
thinly populated due to Covid), and the boxes of Amazon packages in the park
all tell a little bit about the type of people that go to these places. The
park in particular had some sad little stories to tell. A mask dropped by a
child directly outside the children’s playground at the park, for instance. The
child, likely through no fault of their own, dropped their mask, exposing them
to Covid. It’s not like they can just put it back on either- its contaminated
by the floor. I also featured photos of shopping carts in strange places. These
carts have effectively become trash. They’re too far to be reclaimed by the grocery
store, so they remain scattered around the area. One of them was toppled over,
wheels facing the road, almost as if it was dreaming of being on the real
streets. The other was near a WM collection receptacle, accepting its fate as
garbage. Perhaps more annoying is the garbage caught in plants. It is easy to
ignore when they’re hidden in the greenery, so I had to go off the beaten path to
photograph them. I especially like the empty alcohol bottle hidden in the hole-filled
leaves: the curvature of the bottle fits right in with their shapes. Much of
this garbage was in small pits, invisible to people driving by. One piece of
garbage was impossible to ignore on the drive back though: a ball of denim
sadly rolling about. I quickly snapped a picture before the light turned green,
then headed home.
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