Victor Hugo in Les Miserables states: The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. Imagine a world where there is no sewage treatment. Without it, our lives would be like the disease-ridden, foul-smelling world of the early nineteenth-century cities of Europe and America. At that time the modern ideas of the origins of infectious disease began. Coupled with this was the beginning of the great sanitation movement that changed the ways we treat waste. These improvements helped extend the average lifespan in the twentieth century by an astonishing thirty-five years. Our contemporary wastewater treatment plants are a continuation of that nineteenth-century movement. In 2009-2010, I was commissioned by the City of San Jose to be their first Photographer-in-Residence at the San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant. Like ancient Rome or Angkor Wat, our contemporary culture was made possible by a vast system of water delivery and sewage treatment to maintain our large population. Failure to sustain water infrastructures has been a telltale indicator of societal decline and stagnation.