I went through all of my photos and chose my best images before I began editing them.

My edits

In order to create these edits I turned my photos black and white and increased the contrast in order to make the shadows and highlights easily distinguishable from one another. Then, I darkened the shadows even further as I wanted to exaggerate the different depths and tones between everything in frame.

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I believe this is my most successful edit as there’s a variety of tones within the image due to the different shadows and textures, creating a visually interesting image. The highlights create a contrast between the darker tones, emphasising the pattern created by the shadows.

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I also think this edit is successful as I turned the image black and white then increased the exposure, making the sky in the background completely white which caused the darkness of the construction to stand out, emphasising the smaller details.

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The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. The Anthropocene is a new, present day epoch, in which scientists say we have significantly altered the Earth through human activity. These changes include global warming, habitat loss, changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, oceans and soil, and animal extinctions.

HoloceneAccording to the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), the professional organisation in charge of defining Earth’s time scale, we are officially in the Holocene (“entirely recent”) epoch, which began 11,700 years ago after the last major ice age.

Mood Board

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Even more people suggest it dawned in 1950, when nuclear weapons cast radioactive elements across the globe. The radioactive debris from nuclear bombs made its way into rocks, trees and the atmosphere – they may represent the golden spike that scientists are searching for. Currently there is no clear consensus. It is important to note that some countries, regions, communities and industries have contributed to planetary pollution and climate change more than others. Industrialised and post-industrial societies have produced proportionally more emissions and use more resources than developing countries.

How can this be explored through photography?

Studio Work

Objects can be collected from natural locations such as the beach and can be arranged and photographed in ways that reflect that natural beauty, this can be done with objects such as shells or pearls. In contrast, studio work could also help illustrate how harmful objects such as plastics are on our environment and marine life.

Objects

Linking to the studio work, we can take objects associated with anthropocene, such as plastic bags and paper straws, this work can be used in the project and related to places that link to anthropocene.

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Multi-exposure Editing

This method of editing includes choosing two or more images and merging them together to create a new image. to relate to the topic of Anthropocene contrasting images such as an industrial landscape (for example a warehouse) and a natural one (such as mountains) and merge them together to show how much manmade alterations how effected the planet.

Industrial Structures

One of my main ideas at the moment for the way in which this topic can be approached would be to to photo some of Jersey’s main industrial areas around La Collette. I think that this shows how Jersey has become more developed, but still recycles a lot of its waste, so this would be a contrasting idea in itself.

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Natural Landscapes

I think that rather then focusing on how humans have changed the landscape, for this project the focus on could be preserving the natural landscapes, photographing them to illustrate how man hasn’t ruined the planet and looking for the positives through anthropocene.

What is Anthropocene?

The word combines the root “anthropo”, meaning “human” with the root “-cene”, the standard suffix for “epoch” in geologic time.

Anthropocene represents the more recent time of the earths everchanging landscape. From urbanization to great masses of landfill, the human species has had an impact on this planet like no other species before. Anthropocene documents the human impact on this earth, reviewing the significant negative impacts on the planets changing climate and eco systems. These changes include global warming, habitat loss, changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, oceans and soil, and animal extinctions.

It is widely believed that the Anthropocene began during the industrial revolution of the 1800s due to a colossal human impact on carbon and methane in the earths atmosphere. However, some people believe that the Anthropocene didn’t begin until 1945 due to the environmental impacts of humans dropping atomic bombs, especially Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. These atomic bombs left radioactive particles scattered in soil.

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The documentation of Anthropocene is exhibited is many gallerys, following the work of photographers four-year collaboration between Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, the exhibitions use both new and traditional lens-based art to create an innovative and dynamic expression of humanity’s incursions on the planet.

National Geographic Definition – Period of time during which human activities have impacted the environment enough to constitute a distinct geological change.

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Humans have reached a point now where they have more of an effect on the world than all other natural forces combined. This Project is using the combined subjects of fine art photography with film and scientific research to look upon and investigate the influences that humans will have on the dynamic future of the planet. It has become a multimedia exploration of the complex and indelible human signature on the Earth.

General Ideas Mindmap

The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.

We are living in a time many people refer to as the Anthropocene. Humans have become the single most influential species on the planet, causing significant global warming and other changes to land, environment, water, organisms and the atmosphere.

The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. 5 – 8. Anthropology, Biology, Geography, Human Geography.

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Artist research -Edward Burtynsky

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Ed Burtynsky (born February 22, 1955) is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes. His works depict locations from around the world that represent the increasing development of industrialization and its impacts on nature and the human existence. It is most often connected to the philosophical concept of the sublime, a trait established by the grand scale of the work he creates, though they are equally disturbing in the way they reveal the context of rapid industrialization.

Burtynsky is the inaugural winner of the TED Prize for Innovation and Global Thinking in 2005. In 2016 he was the receiver of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts for his collection of works thus far.

Burtynsky is an advocate for environmental conservationism and his work is deeply entwined in his advocacy. His work comments on the scars left by industrial capitalism while establishing an aesthetic for environmental devastation, the sublime-horrors discussed in a number of essays on the topic of his work. He sits on the board of Contact, Toronto’s international festival of photography.

Artist research- Jeremy Carroll

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Jeremy Carroll is the artist and photographer of these images featured in an exhibit called Entanglement. Each image depicts a human being caught up in the waste that is commonly found in seawater and along beaches such as discarded fishing nets, plastic bottles, grocery bags and flip flops.

With the way things are going, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation predicts that there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050. Even without hearing this shocking prediction can tell things are looking grim with the horrifying and heartbreaking images of innocent turtles and whales found trapped in plastic or with a stomach full of garbage created and disposed of by humans. 

While many of feel saddened by the harm inflicted on marine wildlife, many people still take an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to justifying the use of disposable, single-use plastic products.

mind map / location

locations I will be doing my photoshoots:

photoshoot 1:

photoshoot 2

Edward Burtynsky

Burtynsky was born in 1955 of Ukrainian heritage in St. Catharine’s, Ontario. In 1985, he founded Toronto Image Works, a darkroom rental facility, custom photo laboratory, digital imaging and new media computer-training centre catering to all levels of Toronto’s art community.

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Camilo Jose Vergara

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Camilo José Vergara is a Chilean-born, New York-based writer, photographer and documentarian.

Vergara has been compared to Jacob Riis for his photographic documentation of American slums and decaying urban environments. Beginning in the 1980s, Vergara applied the technique of rephotography to a series of American cities, photographing the same buildings and neighborhoods from the exact vantage point at regular intervals over many years to capture changes over time. Trained as a sociologist with a specialty in urbanism, Vergara turned to his systematic documentation at a moment of urban decay, and he chose locales where that stress seemed highest: the housing projects of Chicago; the South Bronx of New York City; Camden, New Jersey; and Detroit, Michigan, among others.

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Camilo Jose Vergara stated “For more than four decades I have devoted myself to photographing and documenting the poorest and most segregated communities in urban America. I feel that a people’s past, including their accomplishments, aspirations and failures, are reflected less in the faces of those who live in these neighborhoods than in the material, built environment in which they move and modify over time.”

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Andrew Moore

Andrew Moore is an American photographer who is widely acclaimed for his photographic series, usually taken over many years, which record the effect of time on the natural and built landscape. He is known for large format color photographs and the series he created include work made in Cuba, Russia and Ukraine, Bosnia, Times Square, Detroit, The Great Plains, and most recently, the American South.

Andrew Moore published many of his own photographic collections such as Blue Alabama, Dirt Meridian, Detroit Disassembled, Cuba, Russia: Beyond Utopia and Inside Havana

Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre

Marchand (b.1981) and Meffre (b.1987) live and work in Paris. Initially pursuing photography individually, they met online in 2002 and started working together with the beginning of their Detroit project in 2005. They met through a mutual interest in contemporary ruins.

Their work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, The British Journal of Photography, Time Magazine, amongst others.

Aaron Siskind

Keld Helmer-Petersen

Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who explored industrial/modern areas, architecture and structures throughout his 70 years-long photography career. He liked to experiment with the medium of photography, which is made clear with his photographs, despite the fact that they shared similar subjects. He is a self-taught photographer whose career started in 1938 after being gifted a camera, which inspired him to take to photographic manuals and photobooks to learn more about the medium. He had joined several photography clubs and worked with several architects and artists who explored similar art forms (such as sculpting) which allowed him to form a circle of artists that created several exhibitions of their work. In 1948, Helmer-Petersen had published his first photobook ‘122 Colour Photographs’ which had gained international success and attention, dubbing it as one of the pioneering examples of art photography in colour.

Image Analysis

Here is likely an example of one of his experimental photographs, I think this because the way he uses contrast to create vivid, undetailed yet recognisable shapes is very unconventional for photography at the time. I think this contrast gives the image an unnatural, man-made aesthetic, which was likely done intentionally to perhaps make a statement on mankind’s affect on nature, and therefore landscape photography as a whole.

This image uses strong lines and regular shapes to make up the subjects within the image, giving it a very industrial look. To me, the focal point is the large object positioned at the top of the image, I think this because of its size, as well as the clear contrast in the image. I like the way the wires connecting the larger objects fills up the blank, white spaces in the image, it gives the image a chaotic, almost restricting, look which I think works really well in an industrial-themed image.

My own Experiments

Here I used the Filter Gallery tool in Photoshop to mimic the style of the image from Helmer-Petersen’s work. With these settings I think the images bear a close resemblance.

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Comparison

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I like the way my image and Helmer-Petersen’s both use straight lines and regular shapes to make up the main structures in the image. My image has more open space within it compared to Helmer-Petersen’s since his photograph uses wires to fill up those spaces, I like both looks since a more open image gives it more room to breathe/makes it more readable.

For this photoshoot I walked around Havre des Pas and La Collette and took pictures of the urban and industrial buildings and structures around that area.

Contact Sheets

Contact Sheets of my Best Images

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Final Edited Images

I chose this as a final image because I like its composition. I think that the clear sky helps the shapes of the lamps become more apparent, as it provides a clear background that doesn’t draw much attention to itself, allowing the focus to be placed on the lamps. When editing, I made the image slightly warmer to make the little colour that is seen on the lamps stand out more, as well as to make the sky (specifically in the lower-right) a soft yellow, giving the overall image more colour.

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I chose this image because I think the shapes created by the railings, gate and other objects, gives the image a very urbanised look. I think the shadow in this image creates a strong contrast between the objects and the clear sky, putting more of a focus on the urban part of the image. Like the previous image, I made the tone of the image slightly warmer when editing to give the image slightly more colour, putting more of an emphasis on the browns and oranges seen on some parts of the objects.

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I chose this as a final image because I think that the dark-grey, shaded parts of the steps contrasts nicely with the bright yellow lines on the edges on the steps. In addition, I think the bright yellow helps give the image a unique, yet urban look. I think the regular lines created by the steps also gives the image a less natural look, these lines also draw your eyes to the right of the image, where arguably more contrast and colour can be seen.

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I chose this as a final image because I think the dark scaffolding creates shapes that have a distinct ‘urban’ feel, as straight lines and regular shapes creates an unnatural aesthetic. The scaffolding poles also act as leading lines, that lead the viewer towards the larger shape on the right of the image, this makes the left and right side of the look image completely different. I also like how the scaffolding creates a very stark contrast with the brighter, clear sky.

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I chose this as a final image because I think the simplicity of the shape(s) of the building (the shape of the building itself, as well as the shapes inside it eg. the windows) gives the image an urbanised aesthetic. The colours in this image are limited, which, to me, gives it a more ‘simple’ look. The blues in the sky and windows match nicely with the beige colour of the building. When editing I made the image slightly colder to make the blues in the sky and on the building stand out a little bit more.

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I chose this as a final image because I think it has an interesting composition, with the pipe leading into the building on the bottom-left creating an interesting shape that divides the image. This image has a lot of blues and greys, this paired with the straight lines the image uses gives it a modern/urban look. I like how the pipes obscure the sun, giving the pipes a shadowed underside that creates contrast from the sky and the pipes themselves.

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I chose this as a final image because I think the simplicity of the image, with a plain blue sky as the background I think it adds emphasis to the pipes. The darker tone of the pipes makes it stand out in the blue background their difference in tone creates a contrast. When editing I made the tone of the image more cold to give the pipes a more silver colour, making it pair nicely with the blue background.

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I chose this as a final image because I think it has an interesting composition, with the structure covering a large part of the image, leading you from the bottom and sides of the image into the middle. I think a portrait orientation was appropriate for this image as it makes the structure look taller by putting emphasis on the legs of the structure. When editing, I made the image slightly colder to give the metal a more urban, cold look.

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I like this image because of how the urban tower in the midground contrasts thematically with the natural tree in the foreground. I think it is interesting how the tower and the tree share a similar colour, while the background is fully blue. I also like how the urban structure is made up of straight, regular lines, which contrast greatly with the flowing lines created by the tree.

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I chose this as a final image because I like the composition of the image. The structure has leading lines pointing towards the largest/closest part of it, acting as the focal point of the image, which is positioned in the top right of the image, following the rule of thirds. I think it is interesting how the blue of the structure is contrasted by a complementary orange created by the rust, it gives the image an urban look.

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Comparison to Henry Wessel

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I chose to compare this image to Henry Wessel’s work because I think the clear sky and inclusion of plant life creates a nice link between the two images. I decided to make my images black and white to mimic the black and white images in the New Topographics exhibition. Wessel’s image is far more exposed, due to the climate Wessel took images of. The two images have different viewpoints, with my image pointing more upwards, exposing more of the sky, while Wessel’s is more level, as expected for a landscape image. Wessel’s image focuses more on an entire scene, with multiple images and trees being shown in the picture, while my image focuses more on a single building.

The Anthropocene epoch comes from the Greek term for human “Anthropo” and new “cene”. It is a word used to highlight how humans have made an irreversible and detrimental impact to the earth which will cause a heavy influence in the future to ecosystems, environment, biodiversity, etc. This period can also be known as “The great acceleration” due to the modifications we have made to the planet through carbon dioxide emissions, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, etc and how quickly and unexpectedly these changes have came around in the last 60 years but not everyone agrees that these are enough indicators to declare a new geographical epoch.
Anthropocene should be tackled through photography because it is a ever-growing, high influential community through audience and photographer, which is able to use creative ways to catch other peoples attention towards why we should be more careful of our plastic use.

Here are the different types of epochs we have already experienced:

Plastic is a key marker in the Anthropocene as plastic production is seen and used everywhere with millions of tonnes being produced each year. Due to the fact that plastic isn’t biodegradable it usually ends up littering soils, ocean beds, streets, etc which can be very harmful to wildlife. For my project, I will mainly be focussing on the effect of plastic bags and raising the awareness of how damaging they can be.

Photographers who have focussed on photographing Anthropocene –

• Naomi White
• Vilde Rolfsen
• Mandy Barker
• Keith Arnatt
• Edward Burtynsky
• Jennifer Baichwal
• Nicholas De Pencier
• George Marazakis