Mongo: Adventures In Trash is a new book by Ted Both, a South African who moved to NYC and furnished his apartment with goodies found in kerbside trash (“Mongo” in NYC picker-parlance), then chronicled his adventures with Manhattan’s trashers, divers and pickers.
Like good mongo, the New Yorkers of Botha’s book were hard to find. It took him two years to collect the cast of New Yorkers portrayed in his book. Some were open to talking about collecting other people’s trash and reusing it, others were more reserved.
“It was a gradual process. I approached a lot of crazy people. They swore at me, they chased me away and they started running. You start to know how people are going to act,” Botha said while on his way to visit one of the collectors in his book — a New Yorker named Dave who uses a metal detector to parse through silt from sewers.