The circle of life smells like fries.
Two months ago I almost deleted an email.
It was from the curatorial team of The Circle at Design Museum Holon. They found me themselves. They wanted this image.
The pandemic diet.
There are still open questions around brand rights - Pepsi and McDonald's on museum walls is its own conversation. So the final cut isn't confirmed yet. But being found, being seen, being asked.. that already happened.
This photo is four years old. I made it during COVID, when the world went quiet enough to finally hear what it had been leaving behind.
No people in the frame. Just what remains. Packaging. Plastic. Someone's best idea, mass-produced, tipped on its side. You can almost smell the cold fries.
We talk about life after death like it's a mystery. But look around. Everything material was touched by someone before us. The Coca-Cola bottle rolling off the conveyor - that's a human idea, human obsession, human hands somewhere in the chain. We die. The bottle doesn't. 450 years, give or take.
We don't create objects. We migrate into them.
And here's the uncomfortable part: death is already ugly enough -aging flesh, pain, the slow fade. It feels almost natural to assume everything we create inherits the same fate. But we're also the only species that can look at the pile and ask: does it have to be this way?
The Circle at Design Museum Holon is asking exactly that. Their word for it is "take-make-waste." My photo is the waste part, which is apparently where the honest conversation begins.
The curators found me on their own. I hadn't shot seriously in three years. But this image went on without me.. straight back to 2022, straight into a conversation it was always meant to join.
Everything comes back around.
That's kind of the whole point of a circle.
PS. Maybe the whole point is to step outside of it?
