My initial plan for the Anthropocene project was to look at the after math of Covid – masks and signs left over. I found a lot of that in Edinburgh and other cities (old vaccination centre signs left in shopping enters) but jersey didn’t have anything as extreme because of the smaller population. At this point I was also very inspired by Stephen Gills work and felt that it wouldn’t hand itself as well to that so I decided to focus on plastics and how used we are the seeing them in our daily lives – hence inspired by Stephen Gill I put plastics over the lens so you were literally seeing through it. The final photos inspired by Stephen Gill in themselves were interesting but didn’t end up being my favourite.
I had struggles getting to camera to focus how I wanted through the clear plastic screen and a lot of photos ended up being blurry if I were to do it again I think I would find another way to suspend the plastics in front of the lens but I think it was an interesting experimentation and something I would try again in the future.
For the second photoshoot I collected plastic bags inspired by Vilde Rolfsen but instead I wanted to focus on human form mixed in with the plastic, the idea being ‘drowning in plastic’. I also took inspiration from René Magritte’s The Lovers painting as I wanted to create something ‘haunting’, so I focused on trying to make shapes and silhouettes inside the plastic bags using backlighting.
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For these two images I used filters over the studio lights – Alone they aren’t successful images however together they compliment each other well.
The initial attempts looked a bit horror movie poster esc so I leaned more towards scrunching the bags to make interesting shapes.
The middle image of the three was kind of and afterthought as it was suggested to me that there should be a third to create balance finding an image was quite difficult and it is not my favourite however i think it works well to break up the other two.
I then tried using portraiture along with the plastic bag and whilst I liked these two but I found the portraiture was overbearing with others and took away from what I was trying to achieve.
The black and white whilst giving it a more dramatic look took away from the unnatural colours I was trying to achieve.
With this image I was attempting to imitate the pastel colour gradients that Vilde Rolfsen uses in her work – whilst being whilst achieving what I wanted I felt that for this product it wasn’t what I was looking
Over all I am pleased with the project and the final images I think they articulate what I was going for well. however there’s a lot if given the chance I would change and improve.