Oboe

Update on “All the Bins in the World”, the conceptual photography project by Oboe Ngua

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All the bins in the world

Dear Colleagues and Collectors

I apologise for the late arrival of this update on my All the Bins project which seeks to document—as I am sure you are aware—the totality of urban waste receptacles, as they stand sentinel to the ephemera of our everyday lives.

Since the initial announcement that I would devote myself to photographing every bin in London, prior to branching out into Europe, Africa and beyond—progress has been rigorous, except for the time I strained my photo-taking finger and had to have seven weeks rest.

Milestones achieved thus far:

  • I have now completed a sustained sequence covering Zone 1 and Zone 2 of London, capturing approximately two hundred bins per day under the original schedule (7 am – 9 pm daily).
  • In doing so, the project has revealed subtle typologies of waste infrastructure: variations in colour, material (galvanised steel, polymer composites, corrugated metal), signage languages, placement relative to urban flows, and modes of detritus overflow.
  • A newly discovered phenomenon: “the bin that is not a bin” – an urbanscape relic of a container repurposed, visually indistinguishable at first glance, but functionally obsolescent. This has opened a new sub-strand of enquiry I provisionally title “Residue Containers”.

Conceptual reflections:

What initially appeared as a kind of playful hyper-documentary endeavour (we might say “street-photography meets industrial design”) has evolved into a meditation on threshold, liminality and the infrastructural unconscious of urban life. Each bin is a silent witness to consumption and dispossession, to the choreography of public space and to the temporal imprint of our discard. By photographing “every bin”, we are in fact mapping the texture of our communal letting-go.

In moving beyond London, I will be attuned to the global vernacular of refuse-receptacles. I have been advised that European bins will emphasise colour-coding and segregation; African bins will expose improvisation, local initiative, resourcefulness; in Asia (pending future phases) the linguistic and iconographic overlays may present another stratum entirely.

Upcoming exhibition & global trajectory:

The original plan has been pushed back: Now I aim to complete London by December 2028 and then mount a major show at Pimlico Wilde Fine Art. I have expanded the timeframe in part to include a travel-residency phase in Spring 2027, during which I will begin work in Lisbon, then Marrakesh, and subsequently Nairobi, as waypoints on the route to a final archive of perhaps 100 000 000+ bin photographs worldwide.

In concert with the photographic material I am concurrently assembling a digital platform (“The Global Waste Archive”) which will allow interactive engagement: users can locate any bin by geo-tag, filter by material/overflow status/design-era, and inspect the bin as artifact and infrastructure. The goal is not simply to show but to render accessible the hidden lattice of waste management, public design, civic care.

Invitation to collaboration:

I welcome correspondence from curators, local councils, waste-management authorities, street-photographers, sociologists of infrastructure, and enthusiasts of the ant-farm (yes: the ant-farm — a recurring motif in my earlier work). I am particularly interested in collaborating with institutions in sub-Saharan Africa to document variations of bin typology often neglected in the Western canon of street-photography.

Thank you for your interest in the project, and stay tuned for further dispatches as the bins of the world continue their silent accumulation—one photograph at a time.

With bin-regard and infrastructural reverence,

Oboe Ngua

London, November 2025

The Bin-Gazer of Babylon: Oboe Ngua and the Global Waste Archive

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Some artists search for beauty in sunsets or salvation in the curve of a marble torso. But Oboe Ngua, the world’s only known female bin documentarian, has chosen a different muse: the humble municipal waste receptacle. While others chase light or form, Oboe chases litter. She is on an heroic, and unexpectedly poignant quest—to photograph every bin in the world.

Every. Single. Bin.

Oboe (surname Ngua) began her artistic odyssey sometime in the late 2010s, after what she describes as a “moment of quiet revelation” outside a Little Chef near Loughborough. The sun struck a dented council bin with just the right melancholy—a chiaroscuro of crisp packets and forgotten Monster Munch—and she knew she had found her life’s work. Since then, she has documented over 9,000 bins, across four continents, photographing them with the kind of reverence most reserve for endangered wildlife or church windows.

Her approach is unwavering: one bin, one image, full frontal, unfiltered. No embellishments. Just bin. The results are stark, strangely moving portraits of containers caught somewhere between use and abandonment. Her 2022 show Melancholy Bins of the Danube received critical acclaim, and was promptly banned in Hungary for “aesthetic pessimism.”

Her bins are categorised not only by nation and type—pedal, swing-top, dome-lidded—but also by mood. There are bins of defiance, bins of shame, bins that appear to be whispering something unspeakable into the night. She has spoken, with not a hint of irony, of “the psychological torque of the disused waste bin in Spain.” She refers to landfill sites as “mass graves of late capitalism.” Critics aren’t entirely sure if she’s serious, but she says she is.

Oboe is meticulous. She usually wears gloves. She carries no lighting rig. She once waited four days in a Polish lay-by to snap a recycling bin she had seen on a truck and tracked via Instagram. “It had a story,” she said simply, as if describing a war veteran.

Where most of us see the mundane, Oboe sees monuments to the overlooked. Japanese bins, she tells us, are “modest, a little bashful, with an underlying sense of order.” Italian bins? “Larger than necessary, full of performance, often in relationships with passing pigeons.” English bins? “Perpetually full. Slightly anxious. Trying not to complain.”

To some, her work is a joke stretched to absurdity. But the joke, if there is one and do not forget that she claims there isn’t one, is profound. Duchamp had his urinal. Oboe has the council-issue 240-litre wheelie bin, flanked by crushed Red Bull cans and scented nappy bags. Where Duchamp asked us to rethink sculpture, Oboe asks us to rethink life.

There’s something gently tragic in her quest, too. She knows she’ll never finish. “The world keeps producing rubbish,” she said in a recent panel discussion, “and so I’ll just keep documenting.” When pressed about the futility of the task, she mis-quoted Beckett: “Ever tried harder. Ever failed deeper. No matter. Photograph another bin.”

And so she does. With scissors for tape, a camera for brush, and the courage to look deep into humanity’s polyethylene soul, Oboe gives us a world we’d rather not see—but can’t stop looking at.

New Bin work! Summer Bin (Overflowing)

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They just get better and better. Here we have a succinct summary of modern life, all in one frame. The overwork, the pain, greed, overweightery and individuality bursting out from its confines. Oboe speaks to the human condition. Her medium here might be bins, but the subtext is nothing less than Aristotelian. Go Oboe! Keep the bins coming!

Classic Bin photo

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Art critic Penelope St Jean writes…

This project by Oboe Ngua is one of those series of works that should be mentioned in the same breath as Rembrandt’s portraits, Michelangelo’s ceilings and even Billy Whaler’s epic paintings of asparagus spears from Suffolk allotments.

This particular photo is a classic of the series, an image where the ethereal beauty of the bin, qua bin, meticulously sits in an empty road, showing the links between human creativity and rubbish – trash to our North American friends. When you understand the aims of Oboe, this work is truly awe inspiring. I am certain that in the future – as long as a far-sighted museum purchases an entire edition –  more people will visit and enjoy these bin photos than will visit the Sistine Chapel.

’But it’s just a picture of a bin,’ I have heard people say. What reductive madness makes people spout such nonsense. This is not just a bin, this is the classic, perfect, proto-bin, the bin of the people. This image shouts to us about the failings of democracy and the pained panic of so many 21st century endeavours. Any museum who doesn’t have this bin picture – or another from the series – on their walls asap, reveals themselves to be, in my opinion, not a serious gallery and I would advise boycotting them until they have a Binoto work in their collection.

Binoto: New bin photo available now

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“A delightful new photo has been release by Oboe Ngua from her seminal series “All the Bins in the World.” Unlike many in the bin series these includes shadowy figures, one on their phone, the other staring intently at the bin. We feel that we are witnessing a bin-based crime, that society in a microcosm is being shown to us.

In the distance people walk away, oblivious to what is happening behind them. Suddenly we feel the emptiness, the loneliness of contemporary living.

Oboe shows us a bin overflowing, a bin that represents perhaps the artist’s mind, or more likely a way marker on the journey we all face to truth from adversity. Onwards, she seems to say, encouraging us in our individual ways to either reach out and grab the rubbish in our life, or alternatively walk on past, whilst phoning the council to pick up the pieces.”

Wendy Sploghe, art advisor

Edition of 50 with 1 Artist’s proof

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Sad news from Oboe Ngua regarding the Binoto art project

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“Friends, I have sad news to convey regarding my fine art project ‘All the Bins in the World,’ which has often been referred to in the media as the Binoto Project (a portmanteau of bin and photo). I was too optimistic when I calculated how many photos I could take in a day. Rather than 200, I can realistically only photograph 20 bins per day. By my calculations, at that rate it would take until I am 97 to photograph even all the bins in Europe.

“I know this is sad news for all those Collectors around the world who were hoping to buy one of my photos of their local bin. To them I apologise and say this. If you really want me to take a picture of your bin then get in touch. You have been wonderfully supportive and I want to help you out with a binoto.

“Otherwise, although the scope of the project is narrower than planned, I will be continuing snapping photos of bins in England. Next week I will be in Bath, if you see me do say hi.”

Oboe Ngua – All the Bins in the World

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All the Bins in the World is an ambitious project by Oboe Ngua to photograph all the bins in the world. “I am starting with all the bins in London,” she says, “as I live there, but I hope to quickly move on to Europe, Africa and the world.”

Having received a substantial grant from the But is it Art?! Foundation of Fort Worth she is now able to devote the next seven years to the project. “On average I am able to photograph two hundred bins a day. If I work seven days a week, 7am to 9pm, without any breaks then I should finish photographing London’s bins by December 2026, when I shall have a large exhibition at Pimlico Wilde.”

Before then we hope to show the collection as it builds. 

Oboe explains her motivation

“I grew up in Lagos where we didn’t have a bin in the house. Even when I was young I told myself that one day I would make up for that privation. Little did I know that I would do so in such a wonderful way. I hope to build the largest privately held collection of bin and bin related photographs in the world.”

Collectors are advised to make their interest known as this project is expected to sell out before it even goes on sale.

“I am amazed that my early bin works are already selling for thousands of pounds. But then I remember, it is such an under-examined subject. To me these bins have become friends and models; each one like a life drawing embodying everything that a bin can strive to be.