Seventeen Thanksgivings ago, give or take, back when we lived in the big city, we found ourselves with tickets to the Macy’s parade. We were sitting on temporary bleachers with Central Park to our back, facing the grand Apartment buildings of Central Park West. In the windows, kids watched from above and I’ve glued them onto the facade of the MICA building in Baltimore. I don’t usually share candid images of children out of some sense of propriety, but…seventeen years later, they’re no longer kids so it’s probably okay.

Lately, I’ve featured large slabs of concrete in my collages, in the form of streets, roads, or parking lots. This is the world we’ve made, replacing green fields with smooth, hard surfaces, and farting artificial clouds come out the rear ends of airplanes. Contrails, which in formation, can be beautiful. To me, they almost look like sheet music. The other hallmark of our era is garbage. Throughout human history, people have always produced trash, or left trash behind as a byproduct of our existence. Archeologists dig these things up and they tell us something about how people lived. Now it’s a matter of scale. We produce disposable things in huge quantities so it’s only natural that trash is everywhere. This is the world we’ve made.

Have you ever stumbled on a bottle dump? These date back to the early days of using glass bottles, as early as the twenties or thirties, long before glass recycling. Everything came in bottles and so people simply dumped them somewhere on their property. I first saw one in Honey Brook, PA, on a friend’s piece of land, up a hill in the woods. Some whole bottles survived the decades, usually small ones used for medicines or tinctures, and my friends collected them and displayed them on a shelf. Since that time, I’ve found one or two while hiking, often near an old, abandoned building. There are, by the way, dumps of all kinds everywhere. They’re so prevalent as to go mostly unnoticed.

There are 31 pieces of paper comprising today’s collage. Three background: the sky, the slab of concrete, and the brown, loamy foreground strewn with garbage. I shot that thin, brown piece from the train to New York, an interesting ride ever time, one that goes through cities, farms, fields, and suburbs. My favorite stretch is North Philadelphia, through miles of once hyperactive manufacturing which now lay dormant.

These old neighborhoods mix residential with manufacturing, and I’m told that in their heyday, the windows were coated with the soot from unregulated emissions.

So, is it ugly, these reminders of what life was like for a few decades in our urban centers? Or beautiful, or something in between? I remember once, a long time ago, creeping into an abandoned building somewhere in a suburb, and finding it overgrown with plants and filled with animal life, mostly birds, squirrels, and field mice, but seeing the hint of white-tailed deer, startled, springing out through an opening.