On a recent visit to our Celestial Coast beach, I was shocked to see the detritus of human existence omnipresent everywhere on the beach; tangled in seaweed, scattered among the shells, and nestled in the beach grass.* I decided to take photographs of the junk in order to show how terrible we humans are as stewards of the planet. However, upon returning home and opening the jpeg files I discovered a kind of beauty in the torn and mangled objects - plastic bottles scuffed to a matt finish by surf and sand, orange plastic strands woven into the seaweed, Neptunian macramé, and a torn and rotting shell-fragment encrusted slipper – as though the photographic compositions of sand, shells, seaweed, driftwood, and other natural objects somehow elevated our trash to a special status it does not deserve.
Or perhaps I’m just a crazed artist who is able to find radiance in even the most mundane particles of his diurnal existence. In either case, I am (never the less) appalled at the amount of junk we casually throw into the sea as if it were nothing more than a trashcan placed there for our convenience by God.
*The words "Celestial Coast" as used here are based on the Celestial Railroad that existed along the coast between Jupiter and the north edge of Lake Worth for a brief period before Flagler built his railroad along the coast of Florida.
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