Everything you own eventually becomes junk, cast aside in favor of a shiny new thing and given little thought once it's gone. But Pasi Orrensalo sees beauty in everything you discard---especially as it soars through the air.
Old phones, trashed appliances, even junked cars hurtle through the sky, glinting in the sun for one final hurrah before smashing to pieces in Orrensalo's ongoing series Lives Behind the Waste. “It’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful,” he says.
The Finnish photographer started thinking about trash two years ago while driving by a scrapyard near his home in Espoo, a suburb of Helsinki. The racket of refuse recycling intrigued him, so he called the company to ask if he could take some pictures. When he stopped by one sunny spring day, he found a bright yellow crane sorting through mountains of waste. Inspiration struck: “I asked the [operator], ‘Can you throw some stuff in the air for me?’”
The crane operator happily obliged and started with small stuff like printers and washing machines. The crane grabbed a big pile in its claws, then hurled it with a mighty swing that sent the stuff soaring 150 feet. Orrensalo stood about 30 feet away in a hardhat and safety goggles, snapping hundreds of frames with his Nikon D810. Before long the crane operator had old cars soaring through the air and crashing loudly to the ground. “Every time it was like a little earthquake,” Orrensalo says.
Orrensalo moved on to scrapyards and dumps in Karjaa and Heinola. The cars often contain newspapers, coffee cups, and other humdrum accumulations of daily life. Seeing them flying out of the vehicles makes Orrensalo wonder about the people who owned them, and how those cars once were so integral to their lives. "I realized they’re not just rubbish, they’re also stories," he says. "They had been used in different situations in people’s lives." Lives Behind the Waste honors these humble cast-offs with a spectacular sendoff.
