Documenting LA’s curbside disposal habits at roadsidefurniture.com.
Some of you — well, maybe one or two — may have heard of my hobby of taking pictures of discarded furniture. I set up a separate gallery at roadsidefurniture.com and went out to shoot some more today.
Here’s a question. Many of these fine pieces of…furniture have really cool colorful patterns. What occurred to me is that an interesting art piece could be made from the picture, mounted in a swatch of the original fabric. Except that would necessitate me slashing into the furniture; normally I’d never touch it. Seems wrong to me, vandalizing junk — many will obviously never be used again, but still.
A better idea occurred to me: take the picture, then load the junk into a trailer, slash my swatch, and haul it off — to where? Optimally I’d find an ambitious furniture repairman who could recover and sell the stuff. Second would be to the dump. So I think the best idea would be to load it into the VW Microbus and throw it into a ravine somewhere, à la Arlo Guthrie. Make one big pile out of a lot of little piles, as it were.
Rather than pile all the pictures into a single folder, I’ve split them up by “session.” Each pile has a hit counter showing how many times people have seen it. It’s interesting that a few people a day hit that site. If I put a new gallery up, it’ll get hit within a day. Are these just Google image-spiders? And wouldn’t that last sentence have sounded bizarre to someone pre-internet?