If paparazzi shots of Britney Spears picking her nose and Hillary Duff
getting a parking ticket just aren't doing it for you anymore, and the pages of In Touch magazine seem nothing more than a blur of neon captions, exclamation points and arrows pointing to thongs sticking out of sweat suits, fret you not. Thanks to French photo-journalists Pascal Rostain, 45 and Bruno Mouron, 50, there is now a new, improved, even more intrusive and stalker-like way to idolize and relate to your favorite celebrities. For the past 14 years, the Paris Match photographers, armed with a celebrity star map and a pair of rubber gloves, have been waiting til the sun goes down to rifle through, collect, and photograph celebrity garbage. That's right: trash, refuse, waste, Governor Schwarzenegger's empty Newman's Own Lemonade cartons. And through July 16, at the Star Trash Store in Manhattan, you can view Star Trash, an exhibit of photographs documenting 25 Hollywood superstars' waste products, including (but not limited to) Madonna's empty Cocoa Pebbles box, Mel Gibson's discarded Etch-A-Sketch, and Steven Spielberg's tattered copy of TV Guide.

MADONNA'S TRASH

While Rostain and Mouron chose to do their hunting and gathering in the wee hours of the night, there was actually nothing illegal about going through these celebrities' garbage -- the only crime, Roustain explains, would have been to photograph any sexual or medical-related objects. "We found empty boxes of Viagra," Rostain admits, "but I cannot tell you in whose trash we found them." And really, even if it were legal to photograph such scandalicious objčts d'art, Roustain and Mouron probably would not. "We really didn't do this to make a scandal," Roustain says. Instead, he claims, "We hope that in the future, these pictures will appear in some history book." Their goal is that the photos will someday serve to document and illuminate the capitalist-driven consumer culture of the 21st century. "I don't call myself an artist -- I'm a garbage investigator," Roustain, the armchair sociologist, says. "Next, we want to photograph the garbage of normal people -- a Chinese family, an Indian family, an African family, families all over the world."

But lest you think these two are fuddy-duddy academic-types who take themselves too seriously to see the humor in Ronald Reagan's empty box of Thomas' English Muffins, Rostain claims that first and foremost, "We do this for fun."</