I went through a phase (circa 2007) of taking pictures of abandoned objects on the streets. Mostly household furniture (beds/chairs/sofas) but also TVs, computers and even Xmas trees. (galleries here, here and here if you want to see). I was slightly fixated with these things that had once taken pride of place in people’s homes and were now discarded, thrown into the street, never to be cared for again. They looked like they’d been abandoned and when I came across them they spoke to me. They looked sad, forlorn, rejected.
I worked out much much later it was to do with me trying to process my own grief for my father who had just passed away. I guess I was struggling with the fact that he was gone and the world had just moved on. Time stops for no man as the saying goes. And so it also seemed for these abandoned, once cherished, items. In capturing their final moments before they went to landfill, never to be seen again, I was creating photographic evidence of their existence, just as I had wanted the memory of my dad to be preserved.
This photographic ‘phase’ lasted a couple of years and then it just passed and I haven’t really taken any shots of abandoned items since, well until very recently, when I just started ‘seeing’ them again and the compulsion returned. I am not currently grieving anybody but I am curious as to why they are back on my radar. The only thing I can think of is I am grieving the world that was. We are in a new world now and there are remnants of the previous one lurking around but we most definitely inhabit a different sphere of existence.
With regard to the shot above it is quite unique in the sense that the abandoned object i stumbled upon, flanked by two bollard bouncers, was in fact me. I had myself been discarded, thrown onto the street and left to perish in the elements. Who threw me out? I will never know. But like every shot I have ever taken, I captured it as I discovered it and left it as I found it.
I love this so much.