Project: The Evolution of Memory

Passing by a garbage dump on the way to work as a teacher, I often notice the giant claw of a truck lowering its grasp into a huge heap of stuff that ends up there. Trucks unload it and I suppose it commands a selling price. But, I’m just waiting at a traffic light and staring at it. Thinking it’s like someone spitting a phlegm of stuff on the ground, knowing no one will care. The phlegm of stuff we don’t know what to do with anymore just laying there and waiting. I went to that place because I wanted to photograph what it felt like to see the crushed discarded pieces of things we used and left. I climbed the heaps of stuff looking all around at this foreign world and began to feel my own memories within. A crushed Coke can, a cookie tin, a small child’s bike and a walker. We use what we have and then like dust in a round ball it rolls away. I climbed the crushed wafers of things now formed into other things. The colors smushed and I thought of robots becoming mindless. Much later. The significance of this place (even after I almost got clawed, the operator of the truck didn’t see me standing on the pile as I frantically waved) was powerful. There is so much memory in our things. So much that ends up discarded. Even without a claw to crush it. This photographic series represents a symbolic evolution. I am taking what I saw and the memory the items evoked as I walked through, as I climbed the rough terrain of discarded stuff. I am allowing the memories in and in doing so the photographs become more then just what I saw, they become the essence of the memory. Transforming a memory into its essence expressed with words. Found in a Garbage Heap Do not cast me away because the mountain I form is not of the earth. Because my use is no more. When you walk the ground I make it may be too difficult to remember, That I was discarded too early. That I died. After a long life. That I was. Feel though the mountain again, The essence of it. Is in you. I gave you that. It is here that I speak this essence. Found in a garbage heap.