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Filippo Zambon: Into the Bin

Filippo Zambon’s series Into the Bin is the first part of an ongoing project about the effects of waste on society and the environment. The project aims to expose and criticize the consumerist attitude of a part of society and the mentality of the business market, which consider profit as the only achievement.

The first part of the project is about food waste. The photographs depict the contents of supermarket trash bins. The images represent waste food as beautiful “nature morte” that aesthetically contrasts with the policy of immediately disposing of expired or almost-expired items.

Most of the food disposed of by grocery stores is still perfectly edible. Not even the store workers are allowed to take the food home.

In Finland, dumpster diving has become a very popular practice among some people with very different backgrounds. What used to be a common practice for students and the unemployed has started to attract people who do it for reasons other than saving money. Dumpster diving has become for many a kind of activism to fight the materialistic mentality at the core of the consumeristic market system.

The pictures were taken in the winter 2014–2015 in the trash bins of supermarkets around Helsinki.

︎ Filippo Zambon


POST-food

PVF 2017
The Finnish Museum of Photography