Trash-- an issue of Alphabet City. The latter is a series that challenges us to rethink ideas central to our lives in urban modernity. One of these ideas is the "throwaway" or waste in our consumer society. We barely notice the rubbish these days, even though we see the gleaners going about their routines of gathering up what other people throw away.

Tina Kendall in Utopian Gleaners links the figure of the gleaner back to Walter Benjamin's ragpickers:

In formulating his theory, Benjamin draws on the writings of Charles Baudelaire, for whom the chiffonnier was one of the heroes of modernity. Ragpickers were marginalized figures of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, classed amongst Paris’s growing population of homeless and poor, who earned their living by scavenging the streets and collecting the refuse produced by the emergent processes of industrial capitalism. Although largely disdained as a dirty tramp by the popular imagination of the time, the ragpicker was reclaimed by Baudelaire as a key figure for understanding and defining the experience of urban modernity.

The ragpicker is responsible for gathering up the daily debris of the capital. All that the city has rejected, all it has lost, shunned, disdained, broken, this man catalogs and stores. He sifts through the archives of debauch, the junkyards of scrap. He creates order, makes an intelligent choice; like a miser hoarding treasure, he gathers the refuse that has been spit out by the god of Industry, to make of it objects of delight or utility.