I would like the have an abstract approach to this project, my images would be related to things that either effect or are damaging to the environment. For example, plastic bags collected from the sea, oil on the floors from cars, toys, bottle caps and other plastic.

Examples of abstract images I can respond too. The images above, all have an effect on the environment, for example the scaffolding creates a geometric image. The meaning of the image may be that the construction of new large buildings is contributing to damage of the environment.

Mandy Barker

Mandy Barker is a British photographer. She is mostly known for work with marine plastic debris. Barker has worked alongside scientists in hopes of bringing awareness to the mass amount of plastic that is floating around in our oceans.

In my images I wanted to take ideas from Mandy’s work of plastic collected from the ocean and use plastic toys. Using small connecting toys bottles and other plastic items which cause pollution to the Earth. I will try to create an abstract response to anthropocene. The black background brings out the colours of the bottle lids, I will replicate this by using a black background.

Her images create the idea of space and that her objects are floating in space, but at the same time she is raising awareness about single use plastic.

Vilde Rolfsen

Norwegian photographer Vilde Rolfsen extracts beauty from discarded plastic bags while raising awareness about throw-away culture. Vilde Rolfsen is a fine art photographer based in Oslo. Her series “Plastic Bag Landscapes” addresses the detrimental effects of plastic waste to our land and our oceans. While highlighting the abstract beauty of discarded bags found on Oslo’s streets by exposing them from a macroscopic perspective, Rolfsen also hopes her work will remind viewers to look more closely at their own consumption patterns.

“When I started my degree at Kingston University back in 2011, I wasn’t really that worried with the environment, but my engagement with the issue grew over the years I spent in London. This might have something to do with the fact that I grew up in Norway, a fairy small country with little impact on the environment world wide. But as I lived in London I started noticing all the waste around on the ground and in parks, and I also noticed that most of it was used plastic bags. I wanted to do a project to draw attention towards this issue. I didn’t want to do something that was too in-your-face, because I think that puts people off. No one likes being told to do something. So I landed on creating a body of work where the images are aesthetically pleasing to look at, and the viewer can make up their own minds when they see what the image is. It was natural to me to take inspiration from mountains and glaciers, which I have grown up with in Norway.”

Steven Gallagher – plastic bag topology photography

Steven uses single use plastic bags to create topology’s, he uses a direct light from the back of the image. This light helps to bring out the colour in the bags. Re using the bags and turning them into art, helps to raise awareness for single use plastics in the world.

In my approach to Anthropocene I am going to try to recreate a similar response to Vilde Rolfsen and Steven Gallagher. By collecting single use plastic bags, in all different colours and using different light to create colour images of the single use bags. Creating these images relates to the idea of Anthropocene as single use plastic is now being band in parts of the world, as it it ruining our environment everyday. Taking these bags to make art work from them helps to reduce the amount of plastic being thrown into the bin and further polluting the Earth. I will use coloured lights in the studio or at home to create the bright colours. When plastic bags are coloured I will use a white light from behind to bring the colour of the bags through.

Naomi White – plastic bags.

Naomi White is an abolitionist feminist, artist, and educator, working on ideas at the intersection of political ecology and photography. Throughout her work White addresses an array of complex contemporary issues, questioning dominant ethics and narratives throughout history, and asking how we can shift our focus away from the current racist, capitalist model of domination to one of equity and collective voice, for the sake of all people, animals and the planet. 

‘A current is a continuous, directed movement of water generated by the forces acting upon it, such as the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon. Interaction with other currents transforms a current’s direction and strength. In Plastic Currents, the every day plastic bag is transformed by light, turned from something familiar into something strange. Undulating and fluid these forms transition from non-biodegradable, reviled plastic bags into seemingly organic forms, imitating the very nature they threaten.’

From all of these artists I will create a response using all the different elements/ techniques that photographers have used. Each artist has similar reasons for the images and what doing there projects mean to them and the environments being helped by the projects.

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is widely recognised for his depictions of global industrial landscapes and his work is included in the collections of over 60 major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London.

Burtynsky first encountered the term “Anthropocene” when he was invited to contribute to a special issue of National Geographic in 2008. At the time, a small but growing band of scientists began to conclude that humanity had altered the planet to the extent that we had entered a new geologic time scale.

For Burtynsky, defining the Anthropocene is a matter of urgency. Once formalised, he believes it will act as a body of evidence that policymakers can use to promote and enact changes that could slow or reverse climate change. He worries that we might be nearing the point of no return.

What is Urban?

Urban means belonging to, or relating to, a town or city. Most of the population is an urban population. In photography, it usually relates to images of multiple buildings clustered together.

Urbanization began in ancient Mesopotamia in the Uruk Period (4300-3100 BCE). It is thought that a particularly prosperous and efficient village attracted the attention of other, less prosperous, tribes who then attached themselves to the successful settlement, thus creating an urban environment.

Urban mood board

Mind map of ideas

What is Anthropocene?

The Anthropocene Project is a multidisciplinary body of work combining fine art photography, film, virtual reality, augmented reality, and scientific research to investigate human influence on the state, dynamic, and future of the Earth.

The group was created in 2016, however, the effects of Anthropocene on the world had been going on long before that, some suspecting as early as 1610 with an unusual drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Anthropocene mood board

Mind map of ideas

When the colours of the images where altered and similar to each other, I had a theme where they looked similar to each other. However some doors were still slightly not straight because of the angle I originally took them at. I had to align them and comparing one to another so that they were proportional to each other. This was done in Lightroom using crop tool where I changed the angle of some photographs and also cropped them to match the others.

A thing I wish to improve on or which didn’t go exactly to plan was that the sizes of the doors are not exactly the same on the photographs when compared next to each other. This is because some photographs are more zoomed in then others. sometimes it was because I couldn’t have the same distance from the camera to the door each time, but to improve that whenever I do a typology next time would be to get much more photographs or the object with more different length points.

once the images were ready I simply created my own grid in Photoshop by using the rectangle tool to create long white rectangles which were as lines between the photographs. I have then spaced them out evenly, both horizontally and vertically between the pictures. This ensured all images were of the same size.

Creating a GIF

With a couple of the images I decided to have a go at creating a GIF. To do that I firstly in Photoshop selected File-Scripts-Load Filed Into Stock.

After I was able to select which images I wanted to include, this could of been done with more or less images but i have decide to pick 5.

Once the images are uploaded, on the bottom of the screen there an option with an arrow pointing down, this out of all options was selected to Create Frame Animation, in the timeline box what can be edited about the GIF is how fast the images move, this could be very quick or slow, I decided to go with a close to the middle option which made them move fast but still visible to notice what each picture is.

What I had to do next is by clicking the lined box under the X, I made fames from layers.

Then I have changed the time of how quick the images move from one to another. This was because of the arrow below each image. originally it was to 0sec and I changed it to 0.2.

Joiners is typically created by taking multiple photos of one view, and joining them together to give a wider view of the scene. David Hockney did this with his work in the early 1980s.

I took a photo from one of my shoots on Romanticism, and edited it to look like a joiner on photoshop. I selected an area and created a copy. Then I would change the opacity, exposure, or hue to make it stand out. I also moved the copies around the image to show a clear difference between them and the original photo.

As I knew the selected topic for me to create a typology on were doors, I have gone out with a camera to town where after wondering for a while I found an estate which wasn’t busy and had interesting looking doors.

The doors were interesting to me because most were colourful and unusual, unusual because of their shape, colours, . These doors were not modernised which what made me drawn to photographing them more as then they are a part of history and can even tell a story through the way they look.

The main challenges of this photoshoot was to get every door photographed at the same angle and size. this is the reason I ended up with multiple pictures of the same doors. These picture were often in different distances from the camera.

SUB SELECTION

I have selected and narrowed down the options from the photoshoot by picking the best quality photograph based on the angle it was taken at. The selected images had to not repeat so if I liked look of a certain door, I would have to look through the pictures taken of that door and select the best one.

EDITING

To make all the pictures relatively the same I have used only one editing setting. This means I have edited one photograph, enhancing the texture, temperature, and played with other setting like exposure and tint, until I achieved a result I was satisfied with

Then copied all the adjustments in photoshop and pasted them onto all the other images. This means all the photographs had the same adjustments done to them.

What I am interested in photographing are a series of doors. This is because this also links very well to the topic of “home” and I find it it interesting how an ordinary subject, like a door is used regularly everyday and is so good at it’s function however not many will look at one for more then a couple seconds to think much more about it, like it’s beauty, the way it was made, by who it was made, how old it is and many more questions that would come after these, maybe how many people massed through this door, how many times it was painted over , or haw many people lived in the house of that door.

with this idea I created a mind map of how to photograph the subject and how I may want the layout of a typology to look like.

Who-this photoshoot shouldn’t include any people in it, since I will be photo shooting in a busy area, some strangers may get in the frame , but I should not use these pictures.

What- My main focus is going to be house doors, however I will look out for doors that are unique, are different and show history behind them, doors that aren’t new or modern but rather old , colourful maybe even worn out.

Where- In St. Helier Town I plan to wonder outside the main street and find estates that may have a similar pattern to the doors the houses have. some estates may even be hidden and I could be unaware about them, this is why I do not have an exact location for the photoshoot location.

When- Since the subject is quite personal as it is someone’s home I need to be aware that people are more likely to come from and out of their homes during times like early in the morning or around 4-6pm as most people start/finish work at these times. The best times to go is during the day at noon, during the week, as on weekends people are likely to be home.

How- Since the photographs I will be making are supposed to be grouped into a typology, displayed one next to the other, they should be taken at the same angle and style. I should make them as similar as I can. However because i am not going to be using a tripod, and I might stand in different distances from the door, I am awa

Why- To respond to the topic of typologies, but also to get an understanding of how a typology is made, including the challenges and advantages of the making process. This could include how to take the pictures and make them relatively similar.

The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change. As of April 2022, neither the international commission on stratigraphy nor the international union of geological sciences has officially approved the term as a recognised subdivision of geologic time, although the Anthropocene working group of the Sub commission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the ICS voted in April 2016 to proceed towards a formal golden spike proposal to define the Anthropocene epoch in the geologic time scale and presented the recommendation to the international Geological congress in August 2016. In May 2019, the AWG voted in favour of submitting a formal proposal to the ICS by 2021, locating potential stratigraphic markers to the mid-twentieth century of the common era.

Mind map