Dumpster Diving for Art

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Feb 13, 2026

From a young age I knew I wanted to be a photographer. In my family, whatever you wanted to be, you were going to school. So I went to school and studied photography.

I loved my college experience but, as graduation approached, I didn’t feel ready to go out and call myself a professional. So I stayed in school. I applied to all the best grad programs — Yale, Tufts, RISD and others — and sat back to watch the rejections roll in. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had no business applying to those elite MFA programs with my artless portfolio of technically proficient photojournalism and vaguely commercial student photography.

Thankfully I also applied to a couple of technical programs. The Brooks Institute of Photography, in Santa Barbara, CA, and the Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, NY. These, blessedly, accepted me.

The decision was fairly simple, given that I’d been hearing all about Brooks’ stellar reputation since my high school photography teacher raved over the catalog. But it was even easier once someone smartly suggested I factor in the weather: Rochester has a foot of snow on the ground at all times, while Santa Barbara never dips much below room temperature.

Brooks turned out to be the right choice for more reasons than weather. I learned more about photography in the first six months than I had in all of undergrad. The Brooks approach was simple: master the technical minutiae of photography first, and then you can go out and do… anything. It made me a believer. My ideas might be terrible, but my technical foundation is solid. I can Scheimpflug and bellows-compensate with the best of them.

I learned much later that there are, in fact, downsides to a rigorous dependence on technique. Not only can it make you proficient but dull (cue Ansel saying there is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept) but if a revolution comes along and renders those analog skills obsolete, all that craft you’ve mastered becomes, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant.

Still, I achieved my goal of learning enough to feel comfortable calling myself a photographer. I still had lots to learn, as everyone does when they go out into the real world and start turning theory into practice.

At Brooks I worked for the school’s maintenance department doing everything from mowing lawns and trimming trees to patching concrete and unclogging toilets. Turns out a toilet’s a toilet, whether it’s in Rochester or Santa Barbara.

Mowing the lawn at the Jefferson Campus one summer day, I toted a bag of grass clippings to the dumpster (standard operating procedure at the time). Swinging open the lid and dumping the grass in one fluid motion, I didn’t look inside until it was too late. So I poured a pile of grass atop a substantial stack of 16x20 matted prints.

Possessing my unique combination of frugality and shamelessness, I dumpster-dived to retrieve the prints. There were a dozen or so, all of them old and clearly quite well done.

They were classic portraits which I guessed dated to the 1950s. They were signed, too. Most of them with a dramatic flourish, a practiced style, and a familiar name: Ernest Brooks.

I met Ernie Brooks one day as I crossed the circle drive at the stunningly beautiful Montecito Campus.1 Our conversation was brief, but he was jovial and encouraging. And if you’ve seen his beautiful black and white underwater work, you know he was a heck of a photographer, too.

That Ernie, president of the institution in the 1990s, was the second — son of the founder who, after returning from service in WWII, started a photography school to cater to soldiers in search of education in the burgeoning photography business thanks to the GI Bill.

I haven’t confirmed it, but I think the prints rescued from the dumpster likely belonged to the elder Brooks. One was an early color photograph, a “natural color print” of a woman in Western garb next to a horse named Don Chico, resembling a production still from a movie or television.2 It’s the only color print in the bunch.

Another print was more unique. It wasn’t by Mr. Brooks at all. It was signed “Boris Dobro,” and the reverse of the mat showed various stamps and markings denoting the contests to which it had been submitted. It’s a beautiful image of birds in flight, wings blurred, frenetic motion on film.

Dobro was a longtime instructor at Brooks, well regarded by students and faculty alike. Though apparently fun loving and good natured, he was very demanding. His tenure began in 1948 and spanned almost 20 years. The school ultimately named its award of excellence in his honor, along with a photojournalism scholarship.

And I found his print in the dumpster.

I assume the prints were discarded when some hurried, harried or downright disgruntled faculty member was cleaning out an office or storage room. Still, I can’t help but wonder what might prod someone to discard a dozen matted and signed prints — some of them downright beautiful — signed by the guy the school was named after.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And so it goes.

One ungenerous interpretation of this 1997 experience is that I could have read it as a predictor of what was to come had I been attuned to it. The cultural discarding of photography.

First, Ernie Brooks sold the school to the for-profit Career Education Corporation in 1999. Over the next 15 years, CEC ran the school into the ground — initially expanding the campus, then quickly consolidating, finally relocating out of Santa Barbara altogether, all the while responding to a class action lawsuit from students who claimed CEC all but defrauded them by withholding data and falsely inflating career prospects, promising bountiful, well-paying jobs in an industry it should have known to be in decline. Enrollment plummeted in the new millennia, accreditation was pulled, and in 2015 the school was sold for scrap to the illegibly named Gphomestay, a company specializing in finding housing for international students. Fourteen months later the school closed.

So the dumpster thing was… prescient.

Our incredibly popular medium has never been less valued, toying with commoditization at every turn. And some chunk of folks are convinced computer generated slop will completely erase the importance of this peculiar medium. I don’t see it. As evidenced by the value I found in that dumpster: beautiful photographs, worth framing, even if others didn’t see it that way.

I still have the prints. I still think they’re beautiful. And I still have a few hanging on the wall. They’re quintessentially photographic — nobody’s going to mistake them for AI. They come from a time when my beloved medium was doing better, from when the photo business was doing better, from when photographic education was doing better, from when everything, seemingly, was doing better. Even if for a brief time someone else didn’t think they were valuable, I saw that value then and I still do, even today.

One man’s trash is, as it’s always been, another man’s treasure.

Purchased in 1952 for, believe it or not, $61,000. Equivalent to about $750,000 today. The property — renovated, yes — was most recently listed for just under $20 million. I used to walk out of the darkroom and sit on a park bench overlooking the ocean. It seems like a dream.

Googling her name led me down a rabbit hole to discover that the woman in the picture eventually became the fourth wife of Vincente Minnelli, turning her into Liza Minnelli’s stepmom. Her name on the print is Lee Getzwiller, who it appears was born Lee Anderson before marrying a rodeo cowboy named Marion Getzwiller, which I believe dates this photograph to somewhere between 1942 and 1960.