Photographer Julian Cousins roams the streets of Miami looking for things most people wouldn’t think twice about. A pile of chairs near a dumpster. A car with a broken window that’s been covered with saran wrap. Yes, even a portrait of Jesus placed on the ground. It’s the forgotten stuff, the things that make you ponder about their origin, that really gets his thoughts going. “I focus mostly on objects left behind, the remnants of human life,” says Cousins of his fascination with discarded treasures.
A static subject gives him the freedom to dissect and analyze, a luxury in today’s world when people—the other big theme for street photography—are all hiding behind masks. Besides the challenge social distancing poses to approaching strangers for pictures, Cousins fears the shots won’t hold up over time anyway. “Masks really date the images and it’s not a fond memory to keep,” he reasons.
The moments he does hope to preserve? The pile of crates he captured while on a trip to Mexico City (“they were stacked in a really interesting way”) and the rug placed on a parked car in Little Haiti, one of his favorite Miami neighborhoods to photograph. “It’s an area with so much vibrance and activity going on on the sidewalks. You see Haitian and Jamaican people selling stuff on the streets and there’s just so much color that translates well into photography,” says Cousins, who also spends time exploring the neighborhood he lives in, Downtown.
It’s there that he captured his favorite photograph to date—a plastic bag. “There’s this beautiful plastic sheet that's hung up in the parking garage I park at every afternoon. It separates the parking spaces from the car wash and gets hit by the sunset every day,” he reminisces. For Cousins, the best subjects are always hiding in plain sight. “I’m seeing a lot of new things opening up and more things to photograph—you’ve just got to know where to look.”
