THE CONSCIENCE OF THE CITY: PUBLIC ART PROJECT

Imagine a world in which there is no sewage treatment. Think of what each of our lives would be like in this disease-ridden, foul-smelling world. In some ways it would be similar to 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. The San Jose and Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant is a continuation of that nineteenth-century movement.

Robert Dawson has worked for six months with the City of San Jose's Cultural Affairs Office and the Environmental Services Department. He is the City's first Photographer-in-Residence at their Water Pollution Control Plant. Most of us are generally unaware of wastewater treatment until it doesn't work. Failure to sustain water infrastructures has been a telltale indicator of societal decline and stagnation. Dawson's photographs of our contemporary infrastructure depict a huge, complex but delicate machine. Approximately $1 billion will be needed to repair or replace parts over the next ten years. Dawson's work is intended to bring attention to this invisible part of our daily lives, and to help generate awareness of when government works.

The plant processes over 100 million gallons of sewage a day. The scale of the work done here is enormous. The length of the six-month residency allowed Dawson to explore most it. The People work diligently to keep the Plant functioning efficiently and the South San Francisco Bay alive. The Place consists of a massive infrastructure and surprisingly, includes areas of astonishing beauty. The Treatment is highly complex, environmentally sensitive and never ends. The Plant was first built in 1962. Dawsons rephotographs show the changes over the fifty-year History of the Water Pollution Control Plant. Three exhibits came out of this work. One was at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in San Jose, CA in 2010. A long term exhbit was shown at City of San Jose's City Windows Gallery from 2010 to 2011. A permanent exhibit of the work is on display at the City's Water Pollution Control Plant. A catalog from the project is being planned. The title of the resulting work from the project is The Conscience of the City: Treating Wastewater in Silicon Valley.

"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."
- Victor Hugo, Les Miserables