“Chasing Sanitation”

It’s a website, it’s a book-in-progress, it’s an extraordinary work about the men and women of New York’s Department of Sanitation. Lisa Dowda and Liz Ligon have spent two years hanging with, interviewing, photographing, and learning the ways and lives of the men and women who pick up the Big Apple. The images and stories together create a remarkable portrait of a labor force that is absolutely essential to the city’s very existence but that gets little love from the larger world.

5 thoughts on ““Chasing Sanitation”

  1. Pingback: Chasing Sanitation « Freshkills Park Blog

  2. I read some of this website and it was very interesting. Too often when we look at our sanitation workers we don’t see people, we see moving objects. We think of these jobs being meaningless and relatively easy – I mean, we think how hard can it be to pick up trash and throw it back of a truck.
    There is more to it than that. These are people who are working so that we don’t have to cart our trash in our nice clean cars to a landfill. We don’t have to be fearful of contracting disease or worry about our children dying too early because of the same.
    I am not saying that we don’t get frustuated when our trash is not picked up when we think it should be or that our garbage cans are put back where they found them but I must say that I have a better appreciation for them. The next time I see them, I’ll make a point of saying,”Hi” and “Thank You” so that they know I am aware of who they are and what they do for me.

  3. Pingback: Falling In Love with “This is New York’s Strongest” | Discard Studies

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