Jetsam, flotsam, castoffs, junk. The discarded and forgotten.
Around the year 2000 I began to notice old pickup trucks in the city with strange assortments of random items in their beds. Most of this stuff looked useless, and yet it did not appear to be on its way to the dump. There was something unusual going on here, it didn’t look like these things were being transported at all in the sense of being purposely taken from one place to another for a reason. It looked like it was just accidentally there in the back of these trucks, like river debris circling in an eddy.
So I began photographing pickup beds, eventually amassing nearly 600 of these photos. Many were included in 2010’s series Above/Below, where I paired them with skies, but I always intended these images to be arranged in grids and presented in a series of their own. And now seemed the time to finally do that, because for nearly 2 decades it never felt like I was quite done collecting these images, but about a year ago I realized that I hadn’t shot any new ones in a long time.
This made me wonder why I am no longer seeing these old trucks with their peculiarly desultory loads. Did it have to do with my moving to a different neighborhood? Had my photographer’s eye simply moved on? Was the city’s old pickup truck population dwindling and had it’s supply of useless items all been carted away? It’s hard to say, but my best theory is related to the latter.
Most of these scenes were spotted in Seattle, which in the intervening 20 years has undergone a drastic transformation. During that time all the old houses were flipped, all the owners of old pickup trucks were priced out of the housing market, and the city became a place for the kind of people who drive Teslas and buy new cell phones every year while making their living manipulating abstractions. These new residents of my city are certainly not repairing greasy mechanical things, dealing in scrap, or doing much work that fundamentally involves physical objects at all.
In other words the city became hostile to the kind of people who drive around with a purgatory of aggregated mobile detritus behind them for no particular reason. The city, at least in the minds of more and more of its inhabitants, had become “rationalized” — transformed into a clean, new and orderly place, not an old, eccentric, mysterious and interesting one.
I still see plenty of junk in vehicles, but these days they are in the parts of town where homeless people live in old cars or broken down RVs. This is something different altogether. The people assembling these new collections do so more out of compulsion than absentmindedness, and a lot of the stuff that used to be carted around in pickup trucks now roves the city in shopping carts or has eddied out in the tent camps where the other homeless live. But during the time depicted in these photos the connection between hoarding discarded objects and homelessness was still being formed in the public consciousness. I always felt that there was a place in the city for the owners of these pickup trucks somewhere, that they had a home and a job of some kind. Judging from their scarcity today, they have moved out to the suburbs or beyond. Or maybe it’s just not a “thing” anymore.
So this series is a tribute to the days when lots of guys, and they were usually guys, could afford a cheap apartment or an old house and could waste fuel driving around the city with things in their truck bed that they weren’t certain why they were keeping. It was a different city then. I only recently realized that it was mostly gone, and I miss it.