Detritus

I suspect very few photo projects have begun with the thought "What an asshole". But this strange little project began with precisely that thought bouncing around my brain.

For years, I commuted to work like many people do. In my case, I would spend 50-60 minutes of my morning on the freeway driving to the parking garage adjacent to my downtown office building. And on April 6, 2007, I locked my car on the second floor of my parking garage and headed to the exit stairs down to the street-level sidewalk.

A blue shape caught my eye in the stairwell. Some commuter whose work ethic was clearly better than my own had arrived earlier and decided to hang a spent car freshener tree on the corner of an electrical box in the stairwell. My first thought was "What sort of lazy asshole would leave his trash here rather than in the trashcan just outside the exit door?". Then I noticed the light coming high and right over my shoulder that illuminated the scene. My next thought was "Hmm.. This looks like some sort of Vermeer-Mondrian-Warhol love-child." I had a digital camera in my bag and took the first photo you see in this series.

A few months later in June of that year, I noticed that a Coke can had been left on the same electrical junction box. A similar conjunction of amazing light and striking color contrasts caught my eye, and the second photo in this series was made.

Thus began a four year dialog with an unknown fellow commuter or commuters. The junction box and the stairwell became this rather strange altar to... something. Commuting? Fast food consumption and lives so busy that everything is done in the car? I'm not really sure. What I am sure is that the person or persons creating these votive offerings to the commuting life had an esthetic sensibility. There clearly was some intention behind the placement of this commuter detritus in that stairwell. Sometimes the collection of items on that box would accrete over a series of weeks before being cleared away for a fresh start.

The project ended when we moved out of the city to Asheville. For all I know these gifts to the gods of the commute continue to this day. I do know that I came to anticipate each morning the possibility of some new creation in the stairwell. Just as a solitary prisoner who knows his next door neighbor only through a series of knocks on the wall, I still have no idea who was leaving these strange little offerings for me to appreciate. However, I do have this record stretching from April 2007 through February 2011.