Recycled Realities (Center Books on American Places) - Hardcover

"Recycled Realities is a book by two true visual poets, and it is difficult to imagine a richer or more fortunate collaboration....John Willis and Tom Young have made splendid, positive, lyrical images out of the waste and debris left over from our busy lives." - Emmet Gowin, Princeton University "John Willis and Tom Young find surreal juxtapositions among texts and images pressed together in bales....Together the photographs in Recycled Realities imbue the discarded stuff of everyday life with beauty, significance, and grace." - Sylvia Wolf, Whitney Museum of American Art"

Near the homes of photographers, John Willis and Tom Young, is a paper mill that sits in the otherwise pristine and picturesque climes of western Massachusetts. For Willis and Young, this site is one of both aesthetic and philosophical contradictions: despite its verdant locale, the mill - with its ominous smoke stacks and countless bales of discarded paper - brings to mind the dreariness of industrialization and the impermanence of life itself. But the factory is actually one where such litter is reborn as reusable paper. Willis and Young's stunning black-and-white images, collected in this unforgettable volume, transform this mill and the innumerable mounds of recyclable waste it processes daily into an indelible and evocative landscape. "Recycled Realities" is not a jeremiad foretelling the consequences of excessive waste, rampant pollution, or unbridled consumption, but rather a profound meditation on the hidden meanings and connections that linger beneath the debris and detritus of everyday life. These astonishing and often surreal photos of discarded paper from the printed world trace the processes of emergence, revelation, and redemption that make the cycle of life possible. In their photographs, Willis and Young take that which we have discarded and create new forms of being in and of themselves: vibrant and ultimately life-affirming portraits of who we are as people and the realities that we constantly build - and rebuild - all around us.