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Landfill: To wrap up my shooting I wanted to get pictures of some serious Manila desperation. There was a news story that made it to the states the year before about "Smokey Mountain", a landfill thousands of homeless families had been living in, some in homemade shacks, many burrowed like gophers into the side of giant trash mountains. A huge garbage landslide collapsed the mountains, crushing and suffocating everyone inside. I asked around to find out where anything like that was still going on. It didn't take long, the dump that I found was just down the road from the original. When I got dropped off a cop saw me and tried to stop me from going into the dump. I just laughed, thinking "I'm way too quick for you to stop me fat boy, and whatcha gonna do once I'm inside, chase in after me? Lets get it on." I ducked around him and ran over a couple dunes until I was out of sight, sat down on a pile of garbage, and began to furiously smoke cigarettes, inhaling through my nose to dull the stench of acres of steaming trash in 100 degree heat. All the people were staring at me like I had dropped out of the sky, I might as well have, a pale white kid with red hair and a camera probably doesn't show up to hang out very often. It took a couple hours of just sitting and walking around before I could even shoot, cause I didn't want pictures of everyone gaping at the camera. When they got used to me I opened fire. Lotsa shots of citizens Keeping Manila Clean. Right on.
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Towards the end of the day I had worked my way pretty far into the landfill, and I was walking through a little group of houses and tents, I looked inside a tent and saw a group of guys about my age sitting around a table full of machine guns. I totally froze, they were all looking at me and my camera, and my heart started pounding, I just took a deep breath, kept my camera at my waist, nodded my head slowly and pointed at some little kids that had been following me around. They looked at each other and at me, one of the men closest to me nodded his head. We stood there silently staring at each other, it seemed to last for hours and I started slowly walking away not looking at them anymore, but trying to keep them in the corner of my eye. I knew if one of them stood up it would take all my nerve not to explode running, but none of them moved until I was over the hill. I wondered if that was why the cop had tried to stop me from going in and decided that it was time to wrap up shooting the landfill.
When I got back to the car Rudy fucking flipped and told me I couldn't get in the car because my parents would fire him. I was bad, covered in sweat and grime, and garbage juice up to my knees. I assured him my parents would see the humor in it, but he insisted in walking me to the back of a restaurant where he would hose me off. I had been drinking whiskey in the sun all day and when Rudy hit me with that spray of cold water I almost passed out. I started laughing hysterically and chased him back to the car pretending that I was gonna hug him.
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That day was the most fun I've had in a long time. It was really amazing to see all these people living in houses made out of fucking garbage being so happy. So many people were smiling and laughing, coming up to ask me what I was doing, if I wanted anything to eat. I couldn't believe that people who lived in a landfill were telling me that I was too thin, that I needed to eat more, offering me their food. I know so many families that have more money than that entire dump full of people, and they don't even appreciate it, going there really opened my eyes to how important it is to have a good attitude about life.
The landfill was about the end of me shooting in Manila, I got so sick after that I could barely stand. It was hard enough being discreet as a white guy taking pictures, it was impossible not to attract attention as a really white sweaty guy who keeps shaking and throwing up every twenty minutes. I knew I had given it all I had and probably pushed my luck pretty far, so I took it easy and split for the US a couple days later. I'm going back again sometime in the fall of 2003. Look for more shots sometime after that.
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