100 Casualties: Adams Morgan, Saturday Night

A visual record of things abandoned, discarded, and lost in and around 18th & U Streets NW the morning after.

by Christiana Aretta
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Introduction

100 Casualties: Adams Morgan Saturday Night is the second work in my 100 series. If you're squeamish, don't worry - these casualties don't have faces and the only "blood" involved is actually beer.

In this work, you'll find 100 objects photographed exactly as I found them discarded somewhere around 18th and U Streets in Adams Morgan on two early Sunday mornings. As you'll soon see, they've been catalogued, mapped, and duly noted.

So, why 100 pictures of trash? Well, when all the Saturday night partying is said and done, what else is left? Just as we sift through the trash of 1,000 years ago, a 1,000 years from now someone (or perhaps something) will sift through our trash

and make accurate (or not) speculations about our lives.

Your challenge, dear viewers, is to re-imagine the events of Saturday Night through these 100 objects. Can you imagine the painted lips that caressed a discarded cigarette, the hard sixpack that a silver belt once encircled, or the smell of a 3 o'clock Jumbo Slice fresh from the oven?

The 100 casualties are numbered in chronological order but you are free to view them however you wish. It's often said the killer always returns to the scene of the crime - perhaps you have a favorite spot?

Methodology

I specifically looked for items that helped fulfill the satisfaction of basic human desires like hunger, thirst, love, money, and sex. I had two pre-requisites for each object:

  1. Each object had to have cost money and therefore once been valuable.
  2. Each object, despite an possible capability to be re-used or re-purposed, had to obviously "trash."

After photographing the items, I created a location map to mark where each object was found. I catalogued each object by number chronologically and took notes about them. On writing these notes,

I was taken over by the voices of typical observers that might be found around a dead body on a Saturday night - callous and judgmental party kids, the hardbitten cop who's seen it all and the sarcastic, wise-cracking sidekick.

Colophon

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