It's not just LF people, you know, even us 35mm people aren't always hunting for the decisive moment on a busy street.
To me, the appeal for me is not in the derelictitiousness(??): everybody is doing the same old tired "beauty is decay, decay beauty" romantic crap that we suffer since the Romans became ruins. It's rather the fact that a pile of old things have shapes about as unique as you can get.
The Walker Evans picture of the stamped tin plate to me is a great example: I don't read it as a lament for loss time, I read it more like his later series of Polaroid, as a fascination with things, their shapes, especially the oddest ones, and the fact that these artifacts have at some point intersected with human life, and gain their meaning thereby.
I haven't made great photographs with trash (partly because I find them cliché), but I'm always sniffing around when I see a good spot. |