Keith Arrnatt

Keith Arnatt, Plastic Bags (Monday Morning), 1990

These bags both reflect and diffuse the surrounding daylight, highlighting the varying hues of the rubbish so that the scenes appear brightly coloured and partly abstract. Although the types of rubbish shown and their exact position within the compositions varies slightly, each is presented at an apparently fixed distance from the camera and this, as well as the similar lighting effects used across the five works, creates a sense of cohesion in the series.

Arnatt took the photographs in 1988–9 on multiple trips that he made to the Coleford Tip near his home in Tintern, Monmouthshire. He did not use any artificial light when shooting the frames, relying solely on daylight.

Plastic bag pollution

Every year, around 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide. 500,000,000,000. Five hundred followed by
nine zeros. That’s a lot of bags. So many that over one million bags are being used every minute and they’re
damaging our environment.

Plastic bags are difficult and costly to recycle and most end up on landfill sites where they take around 300
years to photodegrade. They break down into tiny toxic particles that contaminate the soil and waterways and
enter the food chain when animals accidentally ingest them.
But the problems surrounding waste plastic bags starts long before they photodegrade. Our planet is becoming
increasingly contaminated by our unnecessary use of plastic bags.
Big black bin liners, plastic carrier bags carrying advertising logos, clear sandwich bags and a variety of other
forms are all polluting our environment. They’re lightweight, handy and easily discarded. Too easily discarded

dangers to sea life

Plastic bags are now amongst the top 12 items of debris most often found along coastlines ranging from
Spitzbergen in the north to the Falklands in the south.
Animals and sea creatures are hurt and killed every day by discarded plastic bags – a dead turtle with a plastic
bag hanging from its mouth isn’t a pleasant sight but mistaking plastic bags for food is commonplace amongst
marine animals. Plastic clogs their intestines and leads to slow starvation. Others become entangled in plastic
bags and drown.
Because plastic bags take hundreds of years to break down, every year our seas become ‘home’ to more and
more bags that find their way there through our sewers and waterways. Every bag that’s washed down a drain
during rainfall ends up in the sea – every bag that’s flushed down a toilet (many small bags are), ends up in the
sea – every bag that’s blown into a river will most likely end up in the sea.
Add to that the enormous amounts of energy that’s used every year in order to manufacture these bags and it’s
no surprise that pressure is being put on governments to make changes and consumers to re-think their
attitudes.

Mandy Barker

Mandy Barker is an international award-winning photographic artist whose work involving marine plastic debris for more than 13 years, has received global recognition. Working with scientists she aims to raise awareness about plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, highlighting the harmful affect on marine life, climate change and ultimately ourselves – leading the viewer to take action.

source:

All her work is collages of debris that she finds on the beach. I personally believe this is an effective method of highlighting pollution in a physical way as. i am attracted to her work as each image is similar but very different at the same time. i also think that the black background is an effective against the bright colours of the balls in the photo below.

in this project Mandy posted on social media for people to collect footballs to create a collage and to project how impactful plastics are to the environment. in total 992 marine debris balls were recovered from the world’s oceans in just 4 months. 769 footballs and pieces of, with 223 other types of balls were collected from 41 different countries and islands and from 144 different beaches, by 89 members of the public.

The photo above shows the debris of balloons after being released into the air and traveling up to 5 miles away and bursting, leaving them floating in the sea to either be washed up onto the beach or be eaten by sea creatures. This is an effective image, due to the harsh contrast between the black background and the bright vibrant colours of the balloons. Starting from the top left hand side corner, you can see the larger pieces on rubbish slowly get smaller due to the plastics degrading as you follow it down to the bottom right hand side corner. This creates the effect of of the plastic moving or even sinking.

 Mandy arranged discarded PVC fishermen’s gloves to look like coral and then photographed them in her home studio. “Corals are destroyed when discarded fishing equipment – such as overalls, gloves, damaged lobster pots and nets – drags along the ocean floor,” she explains. Taken on a Canon EOS 500D with a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L lens at 2 sec, f/16 and ISO 400. source:

Gustave Le Gray: Sea and Sky Photography

Le Gray was born in 1820 near Paris and trained there as a painter. Around 1847 he took up photography. Even before making the marine images, he became one of the most renowned pioneers of the new art. His architectural, landscape and portrait photographs, his writings, teaching and inventions were all highly influential.

The Great Wave, the most dramatic of his seascapes, combines Le Gray’s technical mastery with expressive grandeur. He took the view on the Mediterranean coast near Montpellier. At the horizon, the clouds are cut off where they meet the sea. This indicates the join between two separate negatives. The combination of two negatives allowed Le Gray to achieve tonal balance between sea and sky on the final print. It gives a more truthful sense of how the eye, rather than the camera, perceives nature.

Dafna Talmor — Constructed Landscapes

This ongoing body of work consists of staged landscapes made of collaged and montaged colour negatives shot across different locations, merged and transformed through the act of slicing and splicing, ‘Constructed Landscapes’ references early Pictorialist processes of combination printing as well as Modernist experiments with film, the work also engages with contemporary discourses on manipulation, the analogue/digital divide and the effects these have on photography’s status. 

comparison

Both the artistes refer to their work as compositions of man made structures and land, its also both described as constructed landscapes as the photo doesn’t show the truth of the content in the photo. The similarities in both their work is that they both have cut up film negatives to create a creative collage to create one photo. Differences within the two photographers is that Le Grays combination of the two negatives he has used has a clean finish and there is not an obvious mark of the merge of the photographs, compared to Talmor her work shows the obvious marks of the film cut up’s.

Both could be described as landscape pictures. What kinds of landscapes do they describe?

Both of these images show two different types of seascapes

What similarities do you notice about these two pictures?

they both have the sea included.

What differences do you notice?

the image on the right is clearly a few different photos collaged together, whereas, the image on the right is less obvious and smoothly put together

What words/phrases best describe each of these landscapes?

dramatic, due to the angry looking clouds in the image on the left as-well-as the dark harsh lines on the right hand side image.

In which of these landscapes would you prefer to live? 

i would prefer to live in the image on he right as the photographer has chosen to take out all of the negatives out of the image.

Images i created:

 i used the Lasso tool on photoshop to select the part of the image i wanted to use.

I then used the paintbrush to create the darker parts which Talmor would have used bleach to create it, i turned the harshness of the brush down, made the brush size smaller and turned the opacity down and proceeded to go over the outline on the parts i cut out.

What is it?

Anthropocene is how the world has been altered through human activity.

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. Wikipedia

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.

How is jersey affected by Anthropocene?

The economy of Jersey is a highly developed social market economy. It is largely driven by international financial services and legal services, which accounted for 39.5% of total GVA in 2019, a 4% increase on 2018.Jersey is considered to be an offshore financial centre. Jersey has the preconditions to be a microstate, but it is a self-governing Crown dependency of the UK. It is considered to be a corporate tax haven by many organisations.

Due to Jersey’s growing financial centre we now have a rise in corporate office buildings being built, which is industrializing the town centre. This could be seen as beneficial as it is opening Jersey up to better resources. However, the huge modern buildings are taking the beauty away from the original architecture found all around the island and modernizing it.

Where?

I would like to take my photoshoot in town in busy industrialized areas.

What?

I am going to focus on creating light trails from car lights with big buildings in the background.

When?

I am going to take this photoshoot during rush hour in the evening.

Robert Adams:

Robert Adams is an American photographer who focuses on the changing landscape of the West of America. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West and his participation in the exhibition New Topographies: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.

Roberts work shows the human impact and damage we’ve caused on the world. and documents it through his photography.

While teaching English at Colorado Collage and practicing photography as a hobby, Adams photographed residential areas around Colorado Springs at the request of the organizers of a conference on the western landscape. This experience further ignited his interest in the medium, and he continued to focus on the relationship between contemporary society and the natural world. This photograph-included in his first extended publication of images on the subject, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range (1974), an extraordinary summation of the current, frayed state of the country’s natural environment-encapsulates the situation of the western landscape, as the pathetic space of a deserted drive-in abuts a majestic mountain-scape just beyond. 

Michael Wolf – Paris Tree Shadows (and other urban phenomena)

Zhao Xiaomeng – Bicycles in Beijing, Now

The fate of the bicycle can tell us a lot about the modern Chinese economy. As it thunders remorselessly towards ever greater industrialisation, the car has superseded the bicycle as the preferred mode of transport. In cities like Beijing, bikes have become relics of a bygone age, no longer a symbol of a unifying culture of cycling but rather emblems of social marginalisation. This moving typology by artist Zhao Xiaomeng documents a radical change in people’s living conditions and economic circumstances through portraits of their bikes, some of which still cling to the last remnants of a useful life. As the old Beijing saying goes, “a dog’s life is better than no life.”

KEVIN BAUMAN

Who are they?

Bernd and Hilla were a married photography duo who were born in Germany. They are most known for photographing disappearing industrial architecture around Europe and North America.

They began collaborating together in 1959 after meeting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957. Bernd originally studied painting and then typography, whereas Hilla had trained as a commercial photographer. After two years collaborating together, they married.

what did they photograph?

The duo mainly focused on photographing water tanks, coal bunkers, gas tanks and factories. And every single photo had a couple things in common, that being the weather, some times they would wait for a cloud to come, wait for dusk or even winter so they would all get a similar dim background.

What to photograph

front doors which look similar

houses

gas tanks

warehouses

apartment blocks

towers

Edits

final images

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All together i believe i did well in this photo shoot, i understood the task that was set and the outcomes of the photos came out really well.

final images

colour

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Black & White

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Evaluation:

Altogether, I believe I did well for this first photoshoot and I am starting to understand the camera a lot more, I also am proud of the outcomes of the photos, however, I think I need to improve on figuring out shutter speed for the images of waves so I can get a clearer shot.

Analysis:

In the photo above I have created a composition grid to show that the centre of attention for the image is straight down the path where your eyes will automatically attach to. the path also creates some sort of guide to show your eyes where to look next.