Free Range Multimedia For the 21st Century!
In a disposable culture, trash is out of sight and, for the most part, out of mind. Our mountains of refuse, from plastic bags to stale food to discarded cell phones, are trucked away to dumps, hopefully far from human settlement where residents won't be affected by the noxious stench or the toxic leachate making its way into the water supply. But for millions of people living in the developing world, these piles of garbage are a source of life and sustenance—-indeed, the only one. In shantytowns the world over, generations of families scrape out a living sifting through mountains of filth to find anything that could possibly be recycled for money.
French photographer Paul-Antoine Pichard spent almost a decade documenting the lives of the people known as "recycleurs." From Dakar, Senegal, to the Philippine capital of Manila and its notorious Payatas dump, the scavengers share a single-minded pursuit: surviving the only way they can.
See the images from PAUL-ANTOINE PICHARD's Mines d'Ordure here.
