A FORTUNATE FALL,
OR UNFORTUNATELY, AN EXTINCT ART
by Duane Locke

I started photographing trash, debris, the tossed-away, and a miscellany of unwanted items when I lived on North Jefferson Street in Tampa, Florida.

This neighborhood was academically classified by sociologists as ‘low socio-economic,’ or ‘the slums.’ Police statistics celebrated the area as being the number-one crime section in the city.

I had lived in this section for fifty years. I had observed the neighborhood change from the restless dwellings of the ambitious bourgeoisie who aspired to be become doctors, dentists, mathematicians, and lawyers and then move to a location, shadowed by the tall houses of the rich; an area reputed by obtuse observers to be more ‘prestigious’ than the present one, where impoverished-leisure-class inhabitants, the quasi-homeless, aspired for, as their summum bonum, a sniff of crack, a puff of pot, and watching the millionaires play football on Sunday.

The neighborhood had changed from a drab, dull one of middle-class traditional values, conventions, conformism, repression and unrest to a déclassé, wild, petty, ‘let-the-good-times-roll’ hedonism.

The present inhabitants of this section of North Jefferson Street (in the city of the living dead - Tampa) lived according to the ancient Greek philosophy of Cynicism and performed in public bodily functions customarily restricted to enclosed private areas. They lived utopially according to Jean Jacques Rousseau by obeying the dictates of natural functions rather than being enslaved to the rules and regulations of social decorum.

Except for the street lighting being dim and not garish and vulgarian as in that hell-on-earth city in Nevada, the neighborhood was a poor man’s Las Vegas. There was Black Jack and a variety of exotic card games on the car hoods, crap was played by throwing dice against fire protectors. Amidst this joie de vivre of the underprivileged, downtrodden classes, there was always dancing: break, belly, shuffles, shimmy, and a variety of improvised free expressions a la Isadora Duncan.

It was an ugly neighborhood, dominated by the ugly houses of absentee slum landlords, all of whom seemed to drive lacklustre Mercedes Benz, and the ugliness was maintained and enforced by the City of Tampa beautification committee. This group fortified with bad taste and city ordinances destroyed natural beauty. Tall palm trees and ancient oaks were chopped down according to some incomprehensible rationale, or a subconscious hatred of growth and beauty. Exotic and glamorous wild weeds were declared illegal and the law insisted on their removal and replacement with humdrum, ordinary lawns and egregiously ugly landscaping.

The police department tried to remedy the neighborhood ugliness by putting up bright yellow and bright orange posters on telephone poles and street signs proclaiming that the surroundings were a high risk drug area and there was to be no loitering; a law enforcement that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional. These decorations only increased the traffic. There were now traffic jams of expensive cars, Corvettes, convertible BMWs, and Rolls Royces. The affluent came, from far across town, to buy small square cellophane packets of a white powder for their weekend parties with jazz combos, or rock bands, or folk singers.

The neighborhood was notorious for its vandalism and crime, but there were many advantages in living in such a location. Burglary rates were low. The burglars were afraid to come into this section of the city on account of the muggers. Next to my house was a vacant lot where stolen cars were abandoned. So, if your car were stolen, all that was needed for recovery was to go next door. Also, one did not need a television to watch crime shows, for this popular form of American entertainment was alive in the neighborhood streets. There were frequent high-noon shootouts, but baseball caps with the brims in the back were worn rather than cowboy hats.

After each night of street orgies and hilarity, I would find my yard and sidewalk covered with debris. It was as if stars had fallen from the sky; the yard glittered with sunlit glass from broken beer bottles. I sensed the beauty of this trash, its kinship to abstract art, and started making close-up photographs.

Later on, I extended the range of my photography from my own yard to other parts of the trash-filled neighborhood. The neighborhood was so cluttered with trash that I never had to go far to find subject matter for my art. Some of the trash had been there for years, and weather conditions had given it both delicate and exotic colourings. I explored the alleys and photographed what people had thrown away. I found the discards to be more beautiful and in better taste than what was kept and cherished in their houses. The alleys were like an art museum, and the litter was a higher quality art than what was collected and exhibited by the local downtown art museum.

Then early one morning, in the fall, the bungalow in my backyard, containing a library of 5,000 books on literature, philosophy, and art, as well as a large collection of symphonic and operatic music, collapsed. One of the neighborhood’s homeless pounded on the side of my house to awaken me, and tell me the bungalow was falling down and to get my car out of the garage. Well, the fall had already crushed my car. The car was unimportant, just another utilitarian triviality, but my books and music collection was submerged under debris and lost forever. Also, lost were all my lecture notes on literature from Homer to John Ashbery.

Almost immediately, an army of city inspectors, ‘The Tampa Gestapo,’ arrived. The ‘Gestapo’ was accompanied by what might be called ‘camp followers’, real estate men. These real estate men had come with the intention of buying, at a low price, the property that was going to be condemned. I have often wondered how the real estate men knew about the collapse of the bungalow as quickly as the police.

The ‘Tampa Gestapo’ along with the real estate men crowded my yard and speculated on the causation of the collapse. The reason was never ascertained, although many theories were propounded. They condemned the bungalow, and after a cursory and not very through inspection of my house, an eight-room, two story dwelling, condemned my home also. I had lived there for fifty years.

They declared that my house was unsafe and, under the threat of high fines, I was given five days to move. The real estate men all smiled and waved their check books. The irony was, that while I was being given my eviction papers, a drug deal, unnoticed and overlooked, was in progress across the street.

Poets and artists from all over the state and elsewhere rushed to help me move in five days. After a number of mishaps and mistakes, my friend, the poet and painter Donald Ryburn found me a place to live at the luxurious and exciting Lake Morton Plaza in Lakeland, Florida. The Plaza, a joyous retirement home, is near the beautiful and thrilling Lake Morton with its varieties of swans and wild birds, white pelicans, egrets, herons, ducks, geese, coots, anhingas, cormorants, etc.

I became a very happy citizen of Lakeland. My only sadness was thinking about how many years I had wasted, living in the dull and ugly city of Tampa.

But my improved life-style and surroundings, my ‘Fortune Fall’, had a flaw; the move made my art of trash photography extinct. I could find no trash in Lakeland.
In Lakeland, I was devoid of subject matter for my art. I walked the streets, searched the alleys but I could find no trash. My friend, Donald Ryburn, drove me to different sections of Lakeland in search of trash, but no worthwhile trash could be found. There was some minor and petty trash, a few fast-food wrappers, some tossed-away cans, and a few beer bottles that were not even broken, but there was no distinctive trash.

I pointed out to Donald that Lakeland’s trash was inferior. Trash in Lakeland is cleaned up too fast, and not allowed to age and become subject matter for art. In Tampa, some of the trash had been in alleys and vacant lots for years, and thus the trash took on an artistic appearance.

The tossed-away bottles we found in Lakeland were intact, not broken, and so not in a variety of shapes. When I lived in Tampa, every morning the sidewalk in front of my house was covered with fragments from broken beer bottles of different colored glass. In Tampa, I had abundant subject matter.

Because Lakeland has no decent trash, my art of trash photography might become extinct, but my other arts, poetry and painting are flourishing in Lakeland.