What is it?
Period of time during which human activities have impacted the environment enough to constitute a distinct geological change.
The word combines the root “anthropo”, meaning “human” with the root “-cene”, the standard suffix for “epoch” in geologic time.
Anthropocene could be used to map out social landscape and collect evidence of spatial and social engagements. Photography is important in Anthropocene Photographs and photography act as vital ciphers and prisms for a wide range of anthropological concerns, and serve as increasingly complex forms of evidence, premised not on content alone.
Mandy Barker
Mandy Barker is an award winning photographer who focuses her work on marine plastic which gets washed up onto beaches all around the world, she has focusing on this for more than 13 years. Barkers aim is to show the powerful affect of marine life and plastic pollution, marine life and climate change.
She started her journey by taking photos of plastic how she found it on beaches but didn’t think she was getting a much of an emotional response or getting peoples attention, so she turned to making collage out of the materials she collected.
Mandy Barker created a series called Shelf Life which shows objects which was washed up of the UNESCO world heritage site of uninhabited Henderson Island, isolated in the middle of the South Pacific, and more than 5,000km from the nearest landmass, which showed the impact that we have, that us as humans aren’t just impacting the place we live but the whole world. The images in this series are inspired by the incredible coral reefs that surround Henderson, represented by the plastic objects that pass over them, and threaten their very existence. Each image is titled with a barcode – found on the objects recovered, to emphasise the LIFE of plastic that has travelled from SHELF to SHELF.