"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." Eleanor Roosevelt
"Ditched" explores the implications of our throwaway society through the examination of debris meticulously collected for one year during the drought of 2014 to 2015 from the shoreline of Eagle Mountain Lake, near Fort Worth, TX. Following in the footsteps of Augustus Rivers, the archeologist who first insisted that all artifacts not the just the beautiful or unique be collected and catalogued, I photographed every item of trash found along one mile of newly exposed lakefront. These artifacts speak to me; I seek to understand them and account for each of them.
With the abundant runoff of the Spring 2015 flooding, and subsequent barrage of debris filling my immediate landscape, I began to realize the migratory nature of trash in our waterways. Eagle Mountain Lake, while only 14 square miles in size, is fed by a watershed of over 850 square miles and is one of 32 reservoirs located in the Trinity River Basin. Texas has 15 major river basins with 196 major reservoirs throughout the state. Unlike the trash entering our oceans, this debris is trapped inland, restrained by lakes and dams, fed by drainage ditches and roadways.
Individually, the images reveal the variety, quantity and rate of disintegration of the materials contained in the lakefront. Collectively, they speak to our careless abandonment post gratification.
Continued collection of debris from roadsides, parking lots, and parks that feed the watershed has provided additional material for examination. Debris over time, combined with sun, wind and wave, breaks apart into interesting bits of color, sometimes recognizable, sometimes not. The source material is an ugly truth of our consumer world but the images glimpse a re-envisioning of our waste and hint at the creative potential that exists within humanity to deal with difficult issues.
“Until we value all that we discard, we are wasteful beyond measure.” Becky Wilkes
