INTERNATIONAL MEMBERS DISCARDED STEVE GEER ARPS
I
n Chicago, behind the shops and restaurants, there are service alleys. These narrow canyons are lined with dumpsters which are filled each day and emptied each night. Sometimes discarded things spill out of the dumpsters and into the alley. There are plastic knives and forks and cups and cigarette lighters. There are disposable gloves in vast quantities, and packaging of all types. There are flowers and vegetables that are past their best, and crumpled newspapers and flyers. These are the things that we use once and then throw away. Individually they seem insignificant, but collectively they have much to say about the culture which produced them. In 2017 I began photographing this spillage, placing the discarded items in reflecting puddles to provide an informative backdrop. I was photographing things that we might prefer to ignore and not look at but, through the eye of my camera, it seemed to me that many of the disposable items had their own sort of beauty, the beauty of form following function in the simplest and most economical way. Although grungy, the disposables were still mini-masterpieces of design. Dorothea Lange once said “The camera is an 20
CREATIVE EYE GROUP MAGAZINE NO. 83 SEPTEMBER 2020
