The Story
I have lived in London, UK since the summer of 2007. When I arrived I noticed something straight away: there's a lot of banana skins around.
I see them everywhere. They're languishing on doorsteps, hanging out in the middle of the road, dangling off street signs, peeking out of piles of garbage, reclining in the middle of the sidewalk, riding the bus for free. A great number of them are bright yellow as if they're fresh and have just been dropped, although they appear in all states of decay. I don't know how or why they caught my attention, but within a week of being in London I couldn't get my mind off these banana skins. Where were they coming from? Who was eating all these bananas and leaving the skins around? Why was it always bananas I was seeing, and not, say, oranges? Was it a sign? Was there something sinister going on? Apparently these little hazards were a covert operation going completely unnoticed; everyone I asked about it said that they had never noticed anything of the sort and looked at me as if I was nuts.
Eventually I managed to get a camera and started documenting these bananas in situ, partially because I thought it was funny and partially to assure myself that I wasn't making it up. For a week after I got the camera I didn't see a single skin, as if all the bananas all knew I was coming for them and had scuttled underneath parked cars and slithered down into the sewer so they couldn't be detected. They came back though, they always do. This site is the documentation of bananas I see and photograph every day as I'm walking through the city from point A to point B. On average I see about five skins a day, and my one-day record is twenty-two. I don't go looking for them, they come and find me.
Several times I've been asked if I pose these bananas or if I'm actually responsible for all this. The answer is no, absolutely not. The irony is that I loathe and detest bananas, I hate the slippery yellow bastards, I avoid touching them and you couldn't pay me to eat one.
Since its inception, this site has gained a lot of attention and has been reviewed, praised and talked about on countless blogs, as well as media as random as German Vanity Fair and New Zealand's Kiwi Radio. This site houses the ongoing documentation of banana skins in the urban London landscape; the entire archive contains over two thousand, and about a hundred are on view on the site at any time. If you're noticing bananas as well, take some pictures and send them to me, along with where they were taken. Visit the contact page for an address.