Alright, let’s talk about this little project I did, taking pictures of butts. And hold on, before your mind goes somewhere else, I mean cigarette butts. Yeah, the nasty little filters people flick everywhere.
How It Started
It wasn’t some big plan, you know. I was just walking. Taking the same route to the corner store I always do. And I started really seeing them. Stuck in pavement cracks, piled up by bus stops, scattered like confetti after some sad party. It just started to bug me. A lot.
You see one, you ignore it. You see ten, okay, whatever. But when you start seeing them everywhere, day after day, it just feels kinda depressing. Like nobody cares, you know? So I thought, maybe if I actually capture this, take photos, it makes it more real. Less ignorable. Not for anyone else, really, just for myself at first. To prove I wasn’t imagining how many there were.
The Actual Doing Part
So, I just started doing it. Pulled out my phone, nothing fancy. Didn’t need a pro camera for this junk.
My highly technical process went something like this:
- Walk.
- See butt(s).
- Stop.
- Maybe crouch down if I wanted to make it look particularly sad and lonely.
- Point phone.
- Tap screen.
- Walk again.
Honestly, the hardest part was not feeling like a total weirdo. Bending down on a busy street to get a close-up of garbage? Yeah, you get looks. People probably thought I lost something. Or maybe that I was the one dropping them, who knows. Found them in the usual spots – gutters, doorways, parks – but also weird places. Like someone had carefully balanced one on a fence post. Why?
I didn’t clean them up, by the way. That wasn’t the point of this exercise. The point was just to see them. To document. Like a field researcher, but my subject was trash.
So, What Then?
I ended up with a whole gallery on my phone. Just dozens and dozens of pictures of these ugly little orange-and-white things. Grim little collection. Did I stage an art exhibit? Start a viral campaign? Nope.
I mostly just looked at them. Swiped through. Sometimes I’d show my wife and she’d just shake her head. It didn’t change the world, didn’t even change my street. But it did kinda cement that feeling, that yeah, this is a real, annoying thing.
Maybe it’s dumb, taking pictures of butts. But sometimes you just gotta focus on something small that bugs you, just to feel like you’re acknowledging it, I guess. It’s a weird world. Anyway, that was my little adventure in butt photography. The cigarette kind. Definitely the cigarette kind.
