Photographer Captures the Surprising Humanity of Our Garbage

You know how sometimes when you’re lying in bed about to fall asleep, your eye catches a pile of clothes that looks just like a face? Obviously, your only option if you want a decent night’s sleep is to get up and jumble the clothes around until they look like an innocent pile of laundry again. Well, it turns out that this totally irrational phenomenon has a name—pareidolia, or our tendency to see familiar patterns in random formations, like Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich or kittens playing softball in a cloud formation.

What our brains like to see more than anything else, however, is the human face, and Thierry Konarzewski’s series ENOSIM takes advantage of this psychological quirk. In this series, which Konarzewski began in 2009, the photographer trains his lens on garbage, and finds in it surprising humanity.

The objects he selects were discovered on the island of San Pietro, washed up on the coast after a grueling journey that saw them birthed, clean and new, for our purposes, and then, when we were done with them, discarded and sent on their odyssey. They’re “untouchables,” writes Konarzewski, that have “transformed themselves into wandering knights."

"ENOSIM tells a human adventure,” he continues, "the one of our society, since we should live in the awareness of what we throw away, we should live closer to our waste. It suggests letting a sort of artistic empathy flow in front of this plastic flood of our everyday environment. It tries to demonstrate the urgency of doing something for our planet."

Photos from ENOSIM will be displayed as part of an exhbition featuring photography in public spaces in Clervaux, Luxembourg, until April 2016. For more information, click here. To find out more about Thierry Konarzewski's work, click here.

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