A man with a shopping cart pulled up in front of photographer Brian Howell and dove into a garbage bin, giving Howell time to study its contents, two weeks before the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Shortly afterwards, Howell found himself fortunate enough to be shooting Olympic hockey games for Maclean's magazine.

"That really struck a chord with me that there was so much optimism in the city and it was a time that there was all this promise and yet not a whole lot was going to change for a lot of people," Howell said.

An idea was forming. Howell wanted to photograph binners' carts, but he wasn't sure how to proceed.

On Father's Day, he spied a large photograph of a woman's face jutting out of a cart in West Vancouver that forced him to pull over. He asked the binner how he could go about photographing his cart, and the man told him he could buy the vessel, contents and all.

"That was kind of the defining moment of wow, people don't live out of these things. They're willing to part with them. They don't have this attachment that you may otherwise think," Howell said. "There are those people out there, but there're also a lot of people that are out collecting things and selling them to make money."

From June until February, Howell purchased 45 carts from binners, took the carts to a warehouse and photographed them. The results--25 nearly life-size prints of what Howell sees as "perishable sculptures"--will deck the walls of the Winsor Gallery, April 7 to 30.

One cart holds a riotous tangle of yellow, lime, orange and blue cords. Another cart is wrapped with a scarlet tablecloth that's bound with a bungee cord.

Each of the men and women Howell approached set a price for their collection, which was accepted without negotiation, the average price being $25. Usually binners were happy to move all of their goods in one go, Howell said.

He made sure binners removed any personal possessions. Then he told them the purpose of the exchange, rolled the carts up the ramp he'd built into the old pickup truck he bought and drove them to the studio he rented. He shot these found compositions, untouched and intact, with a rented high-resolution medium-format digital camera.

"The idea is so that the viewer can look at every aspect of them, can contemplate the contents," said Howell, who's the younger brother of Courier reporter Mike Howell. "After I photographed them, I would find details in some of the objects that I didn't even see when I bought them off people."

One of the carts Howell purchased included a bar fridge, microwave, toaster, plant, Razor scooter and desk chair.

"It just says so much about how we live, the fact that we can just move on and toss all our stuff away. So disposable, such a wasteful society, but intriguing that someone thinks they can repurpose it before it goes off to the landfill," he said.

After shooting the carts, Howell recycled or donated the contents and, under the cover of darkness, returned the carts to the supermarkets they originally came from.

The award-winning editorial photographer has previously focused on the worlds of celebrity impersonators and minor league wrestlers, as seen in his photography books Fame Us and One Ring Circus. Douglas Coupland has written an introductory essay for the Shopping Carts show catalogue.

"It's almost things that are right underneath our nose that are not given any attention," Howell said of the subjects that inspire his photos. "I'm intrigued by how commonplace they are, yet they're not things that had really been documented in any way."

The opening reception runs April 7, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Winsor Gallery, 3025 Granville St.

crossi@vancourier.com

Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi