Someone’s Rubbish

Over the last eight years I have been busy every day, taking photos of objects that people discard in the centre of Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, England. ‘SOMEONE’S RUBBISH’ is a project that now numbers 2500+ images and it forms a longform photo essay that I’ve completely immersed myself in, because the more I shoot, the more evidence of life I gather, the more fascinating it all becomes.

I upload photos everyday whilst also keeping some unseen. Hunting down the objects people use and discard, building a street museum of now; whilst exploring and looking, I’m thinking about the cost of living in this life and the stories that could be behind each object. All the things we need to use in this world, for play, work, education, health, beauty, food, sex, love, drugs, debts, money, bills, general domestic life.

Over time, I’ve also realised that many of the objects I am drawn to document are things I have used or relate to in some way. As the collection builds, patterns are forming, representations of sections of a city in the present, and the recent past. A big image of life now made up of many individual objects. It’s now 2022, and I am still looking, photographing, and adding to the overall picture.

I can see the patterns of our life through the things we use. I’m aiming to almost turn the objects into portraits, so when printed and presented one really looks, and the object looks back. The worn sliver shoes – where were they made, what type of person wore them, why were they left behind? The fresh bite marks in a half-eaten peach, protest signs, bills, tickets, drugs, dirty mattresses, scratched ovens covered in sticky oil from years of cooking, old televisions from the 80’s and 90’s to now, newspapers, old used make-up, battered sofas, toilet rolls, mouldy fruit and veg, toys, men’s leather shoes, soiled nappies, used tampons, medical masks, wigs, fresh meat, soiled underwear, used condoms, human hair, books, pregnancy tests, clothes, medication, false teeth, bloodied coat, false nails, cigarette butt, rat traps, the list goes on and on and on, a living street museum, a slice of a seaside town in Britain.

At times I feel like an archaeologist, or like I have just landed on earth, and I am trying to make sense of something, like who are we and what are these things that humans use and consume? What does it all mean? How will these life artefacts look to someone looking back from the future?