This is the same scavenger I photographed in my previous image. I made this portrait of him five days earlier, shooting from the second floor balcony of our apartment overlooking the Mission Beach boardwalk. Because of this high position, he never noticed me. (This is the first in a series of five images that I made from this same high position.) I waited for him to move past a trash barrel, and then I made this image. The barrel conveys a context for his “business.” He was only a softly focused presence in the previous image, but he appears in sharply defined detail here. Carrying a backpack, he dresses in colors that blend with his working environment. We see the bottles and cans within the bulging transparent plastic bags that hang from his bicycle. The bike seems overloaded, and so does he. He pushes and carries his load slowly, with care and purpose, scanning beach, boardwalk, and barrels for trash he can cash.