STATEMENTS
Contra Costa
At night, walking the streets of Contra Costa, my Northern California neighborhood, I encounter remnant forms of mid-century landscaping; relics of modernist ideals; plant life cultivated and shaped to fit the lines of the urban built environment. I find traces here, miniature enactments of the Anthropocene; a desire to control nature, to bring order to landscapes where unkempt wildness might otherwise prevail. I observe the constant cutting of this plant life by homeowner-gardeners, landscaping contractors and Latino day laborers, engaged in a perpetual struggle for the creation of order over verdant chaos.
Walking at night with my camera, firing a high-powered flash into front gardens to render the details of these alterations visible, I take on the self-assigned role of investigative, forensic photographer, compiling a visual dossier, gathering evidence, of a time and a place – capturing details of an ongoing compulsion of homeowners to domesticate nature. As well as holding an anthropological concern, this is a project of play, a subjective response to the presence of an homogenized suburban ecology.
The suburban front yard, often regarded as a benign space, is also a cultural space, a container of history, a site for the commodification of nature by a garden industry and a culture that assigns value to property, each home and garden contributing to a neighborhood’s curb appeal and marketability. Topiary forms, once grounded in midcentury yearning, an expression of California Style, now look out of place here, strange monuments to another time. The promise of low maintenance, it turns out was a deception; these shrubs require constant upkeep and care.
In witnessing myriad shrubs and trees being shaped to fit the lines of the urban environment I came to feel empathy for these living forms, the inherent inclination to grow wild, in unpredictable ways, here made to conform to a suburban order of concrete lines and neatness. I also came to observe a personal recognition, a metaphorical depiction, for how we may each allow ourselves to be shaped by the demands of urban living, the ways we are compelled to alter our own needs and compulsions to exist, or to contend with the homogenizing forces of labor, efficiency and utility.
Stumps
Taking nightly walks in suburban Northern California, I repeatedly encountered tree stumps protruding from neighborhood front yards and beside sidewalks. The labor and expense required to extract a tree stump is often excessive, so they remain in place, left to linger, as unintended memorials of past aspirations. Taking the time to photograph these stumps, to make visible their unique shapes, their presence in space, became an exercise in empathy, an expression of affinity with objects now disregarded.
Shelf Life
Winner of the Svensk Bokkonst, Swedish Book Art Award 2021, Shelf Life explores the spatial and social landscape in and around that hallowed ground of American consumption, the Supermarket. The average North American supermarket is 40,000 square feet (12,100 m²), roughly the size of a football field or an acre of land. The commodified space we enter to partake in this final destination of industrial food production is designed to generate maximum ‘cart value’ or expenditure. The over-produced food products bear little resemblance to the land, labor, plant forms or animals from which they were extracted.
Published as a limited-edition photo-zine, Shelf Life’s printing style replicates a supermarket discount catalog. In addition to a photographic sequence, a poem unfolds a personal narrative of resistance navigating a Mega Mart to purchase just a couple of items. A mock Industry Marketing Report reveals proven strategies to make us always buy more.
Shelf Life
Drew Waters
self published, June 2021, Berkeley, CA
76 pages , 57 photographs, poem, text
design: Bedow
12.5 x 14.5 inches
edition of 500
Saddle stitched UV gloss cover
Untrimmed newspaper stock
4 pages inlay text
ISBN: 978-0-578-72763-9
$25.00 USD
To purchase in the US go here.
For international purchase and shipping contact: drewwaters@gmail.com
Undocumented
In Brooklyn, New York, and other cities and towns throughout the USA, Latino workers begin each day at U-Haul and Home Depot parking lots, waiting to secure a couple of hours of paid construction or moving work.
These men are skilled laborers. They have travelled thousands of miles and endure daily discomfort and personal sacrifice in their search for a better life. Many send money home to support their families. Some have started new families in their adopted city. These men have no official status, papers, job security or health insurance. Each day begins anew. They arise and wait with hope that work will appear.
In this series, I attempt to document these workers, to make their presence felt, to depict the inherent strength and dignity of a group of individuals who exist within an economy of chance, making their living via random encounters. I was also interested in interrogating the historical portrait, a formal depiction of individuals who remain mostly unseen.
Each worker was paid his hourly rate to sit for a portrait.