ENVIRONMENTAL: A VISUAL ESSAY BY ALEKS FAUST

Aleks Faust’s Environmental is a photographic series rooted in the paradox of perception, at once an exploration of overlooked urban ritual and a meditation on visual memory.

Documenting discarded urban objects as found, untouched and unarranged, Faust frames refuse not as waste but as artefacts of lived experience, caught in a liminal state between function and abandonment. Like Duchamp’s Fountain, these objects are elevated not by their intrinsic value but by the act of selection and framing, echoing the argument made by Ashleigh Kane that Faust “hones an artistic sensibility that finds beauty and composition amid urban disorder” (Kane, 2024).

Yet, the work resists categorisation: neither purely documentary nor purely conceptual, it invites infinite interpretations, shaped by each viewer’s personal memory and subconscious associations.

“Each visual image represents an entirely unpredictable set of narratives, forming only as it enters consciousness” (Klochkov, 2024). In this way, the photographs become visual paradoxes, simultaneously specific and abstract, ephemeral and eternal. Through this lens, Environmental is less a record of London’s cast-offs and more a study in ambiguity, where each image transforms into a trigger for emotional recall, philosophical inquiry, and the enduring question: what, in fact, makes something art?