Taking photos of ‘garbage’ also may “bring out the allegorical potential of lost objects by framing, dematerializing, and arranging them within the frame of the picture, thus presenting them as something to read” (Stallabrass, 2009).
There is a historiographical and subliminal feeling about scavenging a dump and sifting through the remnants of the past to find useful materials for the present. Figure 8 is taken on the second floor of an old, abandoned farmhouse east of my hometown – Orangeville, Ontario.
With this photo, it displays how “our predecessors simply dropped items on the ground when they became unwanted” (Shanks et al., 2004). The viewer of the image can identify the garbage integrated into the old, ruined records that the people before had left, and it creates this beautiful image within the decaying home; The picture of the records is also connected to the feeling of intimacy of material artifacts and their testimony to playing music as a record, for they are now garbage. With that said, the image displays that the records, “when abandoned in the streets, first allow their material natures to step out from behind the form of use value” and “qualities are realized and released” (Stallabrass, 2009). Taking photos of ‘garbage’ also may “bring out the allegorical potential of lost objects by framing, dematerializing, and arranging them within the frame of the picture, thus presenting them as something to read” (Stallabrass, 2009) or it could even be considered art.
Additionally, surrealism aims to revolutionise human experience, and the image is also an example of surrealism as the records can “contrast ruin with urban dereliction,” (Shanks et al., 2004) and beauty; Furthermore, a designer, Anselm Keifer’s landscapes are said to be “far from the picturesque; [as] they concentrate upon sites of historical events and processes” (Shanks et al., 2004) and certain historical events can also be reflected in the older packaging of these records along with the decaying ceiling in Figure 9. Urban and rural exploration offers a worldwide treasure hunt for explorers.