The Discard May Not Be the Final Story

The bins - where everything is mixed together, sold by the pound, and waiting to be noticed.

I like the bins at Goodwill. By the time something reaches them, its story has usually been separated from it. There are no explanations attached. Someone moved, cleaned out a house, changed circumstances, or simply decided it was time to let something go. Whatever happened before is mostly unknowable.

Maybe that's part of what draws me there. I've watched people stand around the same bin and reach for completely different things. What doesn't earn a second glance from one person can make another person reach across the pile. Nothing has been arranged to convince me of its importance. I have to notice it.

That probably has more to do with Farmstracts than it might seem. This place was never meant to be only a collection of finished pictures. Field Notes gives me somewhere to follow the things behind them - the ordinary objects, places and moments that made me stop and look again. Sometimes the interesting part isn't what I eventually make from something. It's what I noticed before I made anything at all.

I once reached into the bins for a painted cat with one broken ear. I knew nothing about where she had been before that day or how she got there. I only knew she had caught my attention. Years later, I looked at that same little cat differently. I photographed her and imagined her somewhere she had never actually been, surrounded by the color and clutter of an open-air bazaar.

One ordinary find, photographed as it was and reimagined into something entirely different.

Another day at the bins, I found a rose-shaped ice mold. Eventually it found a use with me. I filled it with ordinary water and froze it. When I opened the mold, what had been water had become a clear rose. I photographed it.

A frozen rose, and the image it became when I looked again.

I think I've been doing this for longer than I realized. Years ago, selling on eBay taught me to look closely at ordinary things - to notice detail, presentation, shape, condition and possibility. That venture ended, but apparently the looking didn't. It eventually followed me here.

Farmstracts has given that habit somewhere to go. A broken-eared cat, an ice mold, an old truck, a flower, something sitting beside a road - none of them has to arrive looking important. Sometimes I photograph exactly what I see. Sometimes what I see sends me somewhere else.

I don't think everything has a hidden masterpiece inside it. Sometimes a mold is just a mold and a broken cat is just a broken cat. But I've learned not to make that decision too quickly.

Maybe that's why I still like the bins. Everything is mixed together. Nothing comes with an explanation. Nobody tells me what deserves my attention.

I have to look.