In 1989, in my second semester at art school, I started to collect household garbage. I liked all sorts of containers best. Cans, boxes, cartons, bottles, glasses, bags.
Especially fascinating was the appearance of the containers. Their material, their color, their shape, and the typography. Also impressive was the discrepancy between the appearance of the products in advertising, their presence in the supermarket shelves, and on the other side their shape as emptied and discarded casings.
We buy things all the time, consume things all the time, throw things away, buy things anew. The inevitability of this cycle is simultaneously fascinating and repulsive.
The use of these things with all their concomitants is stored in our memory and our senses, in our body. We will never forget the sound of a match being struck. We remember the taste of chips and the sounds of the bag, the smell of vinegar and the feel of the bottle in our hand, the graininess and soapiness of the washing powder, the laborious squeezing of the toothpaste tube down to the last bit, the taste of coffee from a paper cup and the taste of the paper cup itself.
In just a short time, I had amassed a lovely collection, and I started to photograph the garbage. Black-and-white, color, infinity cove, table edge/horizon line, light background, dark background, frontally, positioned diagonally. This was good practice.
