ICP Teen Academy
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Sita Welt
We have so much trash in this city. It piles up on the streets, under our subway seats, in the cracks of the sidewalks, overflowing in our garbage bins. We discard so much in large part because we create and consume so much. It feels as though that is what we were born to do: to buy. It scratches a sort of primordial itch, like a mosquito bite that never goes away. We are what we buy, and advertisements make it clear that if we buy just one more thing we can be everything we’ve ever wanted to be. We can finally be pretty and funny and confident and “That Girl,” and most of all we can be happy, we can be fulfilled. And then when we buy the thing and it doesn’t work and we are still unsatisfied, the answer to our problem is clear: we just haven’t bought the right thing yet, and we haven’t bought enough of it. And all the wrong things we bought get trashed, day in and day out, and the pile of trash outside the window grows almost as quickly as our to-buy list. Edward Burtynsky’s photographic work focused on how industrialization has shaped the natural world. He has written about the idea that for every skyscraper in existence, somewhere in the world there might exist a “reverse” of that skyscraper: a hole somewhere in the earth that had been created to harvest the materials to make that skyscraper. Do you ever wonder if the things we buy are worth the hole in the earth they made?
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