Running a close second to coffee cups are plastic drinking cups.  In Jerusalem, if you buy a beverage in a bottle you are invariably asked whether you want a plastic disposable cup as well.  If you say yes, chances are you will be handed 5 of these cups for a 1/2 liter bottle.  No wonder they are all over the place.  I think they can be very beautiful depending on what is in them and how the sun is shining.  I don't touch them or move them - they are photographed as I find them.

Someday I would like to have a show called something like 'advertisements.'  Cans would figure prominently in the show.  I haven't found that people do such interesting things with cans in terms of placement - although I do find that sometimes they are very beautiful in the setting in which they are left.

Bottles can be tough to photograph - they are large and often empty so there are large clearish spaces that aren't always interesting.  Taken in context with their background, however, they become more interesting.

Chairs left in public places outside of their normal venue.  As with all of the groups, this is a small set of the images that I have.  A problem I have run into with the chairs (as well as other objects) is that some of them look too staged - and would need copious caveats that I happened across the setting.

Sometimes with the shoes, it's obvious that they have outlived their usefulness to one person and have been put out to be found and used by another person.  Other times, I'm not so sure.  Sometimes I'll find a pair of shoes under a bench that look like the person took them off while they were sitting and reading and then walked off in barefeet, forgetting that they had come in shoes.  The other puzzle is when I find single shoes.  What happened?

These tend to be cups with straws, but not exclusively.  Straws are a challenge to photograph.  They tend to blend into the background.

Empty to go food containers are all over the place.  People have asked if this work is about environmentalism.  I can honestly say that it isn't.  It really is about my fascination with placement and finding the beauty and story in what has been discarded.  Having said that, let it not be said that all of these single serving containers (and how many of them are even a single serving?...not to my belly, that's for sure) don't drive me nuts!

Many times cigarettes end up being paired with coffee cups; in a funny pairing, in the photographic documentation Bye Bye Baby they were occasionally photographed with pacifiers.  Primarily people leave cigarette packs lying on their sides and cigarette butts dropped on the ground, but occasionally they do interesting things with them.

Jerusalem is a city that has a lot of freecycling in the form of things being left on walls for people to find and take away.  There is also an ethic of trying to get lost items back to their owners - perhaps that is what is the case in the settings I come across.

Bread is left out all around the city - maybe for the cats, maybe for the birds, maybe for the poor, maybe because it's hard to throw food away.  It's a challenge to photograph.  I primarily think of this as documentation.