Hilla and Bernd Becher
The two German photographers who set out to record Germany’s, and later the world’s, disappearing industrial architectural heritage with their hallmark black and white photographs. Their systematic approach to photographing structures that would not normally interest the general public but which are inherent to the way we live, probably helped to inspire me to choose dustbins as a subject to focus on.
See Hilla’s Wikipedia profile.
Chris Jordan
A US photographer and activist, who has taken many pictures of waste, using statistics and sheer scale to highlight the extent of the waste incurred by humankind today:
One of his projects linked to waste, ‘Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption’ (2003-2005) showing a multitude of wasted mobile phones. See also his 2008 TED talk, Turning powerful stats into art.
Arman
Arman, a franco-american artist born in Nice in 1928, worked with objects and discarded objects. He created a series, ‘Les Poubelles’, in 1959 where he shows household and street waste encased in plexiglas boxes, soon followed by an exhibition in a Parisian gallery where he filled a room with waste. He died in New York in 2005. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arman