Discarded, Steve Geer

INTERNATIONAL MEMBERS DISCARDED

STEVE GEER ARPS

In 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

instrument that teaches people to see without a camera.” The most rewarding photography projects are, I think, the ones for which this rings true.

Inspired by what I was seeing, I began to arrange the once-used things I was finding into still-life groupings inspired by their all-too-brief usage.

I live in the city. I buy things in the shops and eat in the restaurants. I see my own day-to-day activities in many of these still-life vignettes. They are self-portraits in which I am absent. Many of the discarded things will still be around, in landfills or elsewhere, long after I’ve gone and perhaps long after the city has gone.

Towards the end of the project, as I arranged unsavory things in a large alley puddle, I noticed that I was being watched by two police officers sitting in their car a few yards away. I was blocking the alley with my tripod. There was a time when I would have been put off by being watched so closely but photography sometimes encourages us to go outside our comfort zone, and that’s a good thing. Once I was done, the police officers drove slowly past, smiling and waving as they went.

Images from the project were exhibited last year in a featured exhibition at the Perspective Gallery of Fine Art Photography in Evanston, Illinois. I chose black and white prints for the exhibit, a good match I thought for the arranged shapes, the reflected light, and the gritty textures of the alley surfaces.