Still, Lives
Still Lives at Dump
On this project I strive to make photographs of junk from my town dump feel paradoxically alive. The local dump is a landscape of possibility with machinery and debris, much of it abandoned, left out of the recycling stream. Some things look like alien life forms.
My town doesn't have trash pickup, so we haul our garbage to the
dump ourselves, and it is part of my life. I grew up on construction
sites. The dump feels familiar. I have photographed the dump for years.
The hidden geometries, colors and textures of the dump, to me, can be beautiful. This is a series where I have taken apart that beauty and created abstractions that have been repurposed into forms that imply organicity. They are often in pairs. The series imagines a world where inanimate objects imply a range of human attributes, connection, sensuality, even humor. And they can have beauty.