CHASESNYDER

WASTEMANAGEMENT

CAVITIESZINE

PRESENTS

CHASESNYDER

A R T I S T

C H A S E S N Y D E RAt first I photographed garbage in Kathmandu because it was sensational.

A powerfully stinking midden just feet away from the bright colors and smells of a fresh vegetable market grabbed me with visual and olfactory

reminders of our out of control material consumption.

The typical reaction to garbage is to put it far away, quickly, and when the infrastructure to do that isn’t available, garbage tends to collect in middle

spaces, outside peoples’ homes, but in easily accessible places close by. I became accustomed to the sight of urban dumps and green spaces scabbed with trash piles, and the smell of burning plastic. Eventually I

was surprised by how numb I had grown to it.

My ability to accept garbage in public places as a fact of life made me wonder if there is any hope of curbing human waste production. If I can grow numb to the gross sensations of garbage in public corridors and

green spaces, so can anyone.

But I kept taking pictures. Something about the intersection of peoples’ daily lives with the waste they had already discarded was irresistible.

After becoming numb to the presence of the garbage itself, I couldn’t stop paying attention to how people interacted with it as they passed. People

added to it, or made faces at the stink, or kicked pieces of it aside as they opened their vegetable stands right next to it.

A sort of pride makes us separate ourselves from our garbage, but we can’t exist without making it. The production and management of waste is a part of life that many people (myself included) have unconsciously des-ignated Someone Else’s Problem, and it is easy to maintain this illusion

when trash gets moved out of sight and out of mind quickly.

When it is all around us and we don’t have the means to put it Elsewhere anymore, we’ll all have to pay more attention.

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CHASESNYDER