Saturday, July 5, 2008

Recycle Center


You back up your truck to the edge of the cement pit and then toss all manner of unwanted things into it. What a liberating experience! And the sounds!

The recycle center (officially, the Resource Recovery Center) in San Rafael is a wonderful place, photogenic too. I took this series of pictures on color film using a Minolta 7000i. My first collage was a physical one: printing the photos and pasting them to a background as in David Hockney’s Pearblossom Highway. For this version I used Photoshop, adding a drop shadow to each photo to add a little depth.

It only remains to be said that the print has also been a modest commercial success, multiple copies selling these past few months.

Photo: Recycle Center—San Rafael, 1999

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had no idea what this would look like. I love it! The collage (and shadowing) gives such a textured and also airy feeling to the architecture... great!

Mike Mundy said...

Thanks!

After taking this, I tried to find additional subjects that would lend themselves to this technique. Only other thing that seemed to work was a strip mall in Southern California.