A single image is never just that. Rather, it can invoke a sense of space and time, provide a stylized commentary on Life, or on those questionable days — be the simple proof that we exist.

It can also show us our relative presence: how we observe and frame Reality; how we fit, and feel the world.

I learned to see through photographs.

This sense of seeing evolves — as Awareness

… and changes my relation to Life.

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Trash

I like Trash. I didn’t realize how much I liked Trash till I found myself on a beach taking pictures of people’s remnants — their marks of Humanity. Whatever people cast off was picked up by wind/sea/bulldozer and found its way here. Often in a tangled heap, woven into a strand of kelp; at rest in unique configurations. It was beautiful. Unplanned.

Sometimes the “trash” was a deliberate marking. A tire track or “tag” — so perfect for this Long Beach City at the shore. And however it appeared, to me it was always art — always part of a larger conversation. And not simply the one about our wasteful materialism, or lack of regard for Nature and Property — sure, that was there, but that wasn’t the whole story.

So how else could we hold this experience of “trash”? See the way it connects us to a vast web of relationships. How it stands in proclamation of the living: a note that “someone was here,” mixed it up, and left this.

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When we see “trash” differently, what has shifted?

Only our Awareness

Only our Relation to What Is

Only Everything

This is how simple it is to take a bigger perspective.

If we can see trash differently, what else is possible?