7 Days of Garbage

7 Days of Garbage is a series of portraits of friends, neighbors, and other acquaintances with the garbage they accumulate in the course of a week.

7 Days of Garbage looks at garbage in a way that makes consumption, excess and waste impossible to ignore. I asked friends, family, neighbors, and other acquaintances to save their garbage for a week and then lie down and be photographed in it. I've created the environments for the portraits in my yard in Altadena, CA - forest, beach, snow, pond - settings lifted from nature to suggest the pervasiveness of our trash. The result is instant archeology, a record not only of our waste, but of our values. In these pictures, the subjects (which include me and my family) are both victims and perpetrators; we are cogs in a machine we feel is beyond our control. But we are capable of making changes in our consumption habits. The deeper goal of 7 Days of Garbage is to be a catalyst for change and to contribute to a growing, grassroots community that is taking responsibility for the global crisis of excess and waste.