WPC: Abandoned

ABANDONED (Meredith): So I was at the Auckland Domain – alone, on a perfect May day*.

 I was thinking through my options for photographing the theme ‘Abandoned’, and I knew I wanted to deal with rubbish or waste and with how much of the stuff we as a species produce.

“It’d be perfect,” I thought, “if I could just stumble on an abandoned thing – some discarded object left lying around in a public space. Something that’s out of place – yet somehow picturesque! Litter, probably – or something left behind – intentionally or not.

“Something plastic, perhaps, to highlight the mountains, and islands, of non-degradable waste that dot the planet, and that we add to daily. And something frivolous – perhaps a piece of advertising? Or a shoe? Or a piece of a toy?

“And let it be sharply, brightly – almost too brightly – coloured. Isn’t that intensity, that brash brightness, what makes modern plastics so seductive?

“Let it stand out, beautiful in its extreme colour yet jarring in its uncompromising permanence, against an otherwise unspoiled, even pastoral backdrop. Could the setting and the object act together as a visual metaphor? A proxy for the remarkable planet we inhabit and the abandoned objects, in their billions, with which we choose to stifle it?”

And then I looked down. And there this was**. It felt almost too perfect*** but I wasn’t complaining.

*I was in a planet-conscious frame of mind – that morning, at the Auckland Writers Festival, Alice Walker had described the Earth as mother, and questioned how we humans, her children, could knowingly damage her so profoundly. Here’s another perspective on the Alice Walker event and others at the Festival

**I think it’s a superhero’s arm (Spiderman?). The object close by is an uninflated balloon, labelled (appropriately) ‘red’. Couldn’t have been pleased-er; got snapping; experimented (not very successfully) with a short depth of field; started by photographing from above but was far happier with the down-at-grass-level shots.

***And it wasn’t until I uploaded the photos that I realised they also incorporated ‘waste’ of a very different kind – the excreted casts of earthworms that live in the soil of the Domain. Far from the dead end that is non-degradable plastic waste, the casts are evidence of how earthworms modify soil chemically and physically in ways that benefit the ecosystem that depend on it.