The international award-winning photographic artist, Mandy Barker, whose work consisted of marine plastic debris for more than 14 years. Her success has reached global recognition and her work with scientist is to bring awareness about the harmful truth of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans where it highlights climate change, the harmful affect on marine life and ultimately ourselves, which leads the viewer to take action.

Mandy extraordinary pieces of art has been published in over 50 different countries which consists of: TIME magazine, The new scientist, national geographic magazine, The guardian, Smithsonian etc..

Her work has been exhibited world wide from MoMA Museum of Modern Art, and the United Nations headquarters in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum London, and the Science & Technology Park Hong Kong. She was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet award SPACE in 2017, which is the worlds leading photography award for sustainability, and she was also nominated for the magnum award for the Magnum doundation fund, LOBA award and the Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize 2020.

She is a legatee of the 2018 National Geographic Society Grant for Research and Exploration. Her first ever book was called ‘Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals’. It was was rightfully chosen as one of the Ten Best Photography Books of 2017, by Smithsonian, and her the other book ‘Altered Ocean’ was chosen by The Royal Photographic Society as one of the most desired titles and top 10 Photobooks of 2019. Mandy is proudly a member of the Union of Concerned Photographers UCP for short. This union is dedicated in using the power of imagery to highlight the urgency of environmental concerns.

In 2012 Mandy was awarded The Royal Photographic Society’s Environmental Bursary which enabled her to join a bunch of scientists in a research expedition which sailed from Japan to Hawaii. Its purpose being to acknowledge the build up of marine plastic debris, in the tsunami debris field in the Pacific Ocean.

She states “The aim of my work is to engage with and stimulate an emotional response in the viewer by combining a contradiction between initial aesthetic attraction along with the subsequent message of awareness. The research process is a vital part of my development as the images I make are based on scientific fact, essential to the integrity of my work. The impact of marine plastic is an area I have documented for more than 10 years and am committed to pursuing through visual interpretation, and in collaboration with science I hope it will ultimately lead to positive action in tackling this increasing environmental problem, which is currently of global concern”. 

1. Why have you chosen this artist?

I have chosen this artist because I think that her work and dedication is extradordinary. I really like how she manages to transform something like a normal image with a black background, into something that has so much depth and meaning. I also really love how much awareness she brings with her images and how she manages to manipulate the audiences attention by producing an image which is only garbage but making it unique and something that peeks interest and therefore bring out recognition towards environmental concerns.

2. What interests you about their work?

How much depth the photos have. How she is able to intrigue audiences by controlling how she decides to portray her ideas. Instead of blandly displaying pictures of plastics, she creates this distinctive image which at a glance looks like an art piece but in more profundity, it is a masterpiece that also brings perception towards plastic litter.

3. How does the work relate to the theme of Anthropocene?

Her work evidently relates to the theme of Anthropocene because it shows the damage and negative change that human species have caused towards the planet. She does this by taking pictures of scary amounts of plastic litter, found around the world.

4. What are you going to do as a response to their work?

I’m going to create a set of images of types of litter that is most commonly found around the world, and display them in a black background like she does with her pictures. I think I also plan on producing an image where I create a type a circle, representing earth, but the circle will be created with all types of litter/trash to bring awareness of what earth is becoming. I want to also produce and image where I show how long it takes for pieces of litter to disintegrate.

MOOD BOARD:

LINKS:

https://www.mandy-barker.com

Artist Research- Mandy Baker

Photographer Analysis – Alexander Mourant

Mourant is a Jersey born artist, educator, curator and writer based in London. His practice and research centres on photography, writing, performance and sculpture, with a particular interest in the legacies of agriculture, Land Art and Arte Povera.

For the exhibition, Mourant had created a new sculpture, “An Image That Holds Its Heat”. The artwork abstracts an original photograph depicting the effects of the weather upon a tomato crop (September, 1963).

The structures, taking the form of barn cloches used for growing vegetables, reference the history of photography in the 19th century when collodion photographs were made on glass negatives. Built on some of the most fertile land in Norway.

Here I’m planning to go round places where its not very busy and everything is very subtle, however my photoshoot will look very different as it wouldn’t be snowing when I take these photos, it will most likely be sunny or raining, I would like to find a single house planted in the middle of no where as it adds such mystery to the house and why it may be there. I also chose a photograph that seems to have an effect to it which makes it look very unusual, I could round to a neighbourhood and take pictures of the houses scattered around and simply add an effect to it after, however if I wanted to make it look different I could go when the sun is setting or rising to make the effect look different and have different levelling of the colours.

Mariska Lavigne has a photoshoot called lost lands where she takes photos of different buildings that may give off a lost sensation. There are many buildings that are in the middle of nothing, and unusual leaves that just look out of this world, Lavigne created images of anything that looked “different” and didn’t fit to the normal standard of todays world which shows us that everyone, everything is different.

She had been Travelling through Iceland for four months, a country she was unfamiliar with: The light was bright, colours were vivid, and by the end of my trip the sun kept on shining all night long. Snow still held the country in its veil, creating a big white void. she states that this has a way of cleaning up the landscape, the scenery gets more graphic. she always wondering how this scene would look like in wintertime to see how different the sky and the environment would look, she had decided to go back for another month in January. The country turns blue at dusk in wintertime. All colours fade. Cities look like scale models seeking shelter from the weather in the shadow of the mountains. It was her intention to express the dazzling moment, she wanted to get different point of views of the different season around them and how differently the world may look if the sun is out or if the sky if full of gloomy clouds.

MICHAEL MARTEN

Michael was born in 1947 in London, United Kingdom (age 77 years). Michael Marten started taking photographs as a teenager and has been involved with photography ever since. His first job was caption writer at the Camera Press photo agency. He also was formerly a graduate student in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Edinburgh, and now teaches at SOAS. In 1973 he was one of a group who published ‘An Index of Possibilities’, an alternative encyclopedia of ideas. In 1979 he started the specialist photo agency, Science Photo Library. He has co-authored several books of scientific imagery, including ‘Worlds Within Worlds’ (1978) and ‘The Particle Odyssey’ (2002).

Sea Change:

High quality use of diptych and triptych and exploring low vs excessive tides to peer how it adapts to a panorama scene.

Since 2003 Michael Marten has travelled to unique elements of the British coast to picture equal perspectives at high and low tide, six or eighteen hours apart. His unexpected pics monitor how the two times day by day rhythm of ebb and flood can dramatically rework the landscape. Also in 2003 Michael has concentrated on landscape photography. His first major series was ‘Sea Change’ (2003-12). A second project, ‘Godrevy’, was exhibited and published in 2015.

Why have I chosen this artist?

I have chosen this artist because I love the atmosphere that each images creates and how its set. I like the way he takes three different pictures but all in the same place but just different angles, it makes it more interesting.

Who was Michael Marten inspired by?

Michael had loads of inspirations but the main people that inspired him was David Stanley, Tony Mamic and Bruce Percy.

“Finally, inspiration comes from many sources (most listed on his website but stand outs being David Stanley, Tony Mamic and Bruce Percy).”

why did Michael marten mostly take photographs of the sea?

Michael Marten says – “I am interested in showing how landscape changes over time through natural processes and cycles. The camera that observes low and high tide side by side enables us to observe simultaneously two moments in time, two states of nature“.

How does this work relate to the theme of Anthropocene?

YVES MARCHAND & ROMAIN MEFFRE

The ruins of Detroit:

Until the 1960s, Detroit became one in all America`s maximum crucial cities. It became a hub of enterprise with a populace of virtually million and a skyline to rival that of any U.S. city. Furthermore, its homes have been monuments to its achievement and energy within side the first 1/2 of of the 20th century. However, on the begin of the twenty-first century, the ones identical monuments are actually ruins: the United Artists Theatre, the Whitney Building, the Farwell Building. And the as soon as ravishing Michigan Central Station (unused in view that 1988) nowadays appearance as though a bomb had dropped on Motor City, leaving at the back of the ruins of a as soon as notable civilization. So, in a chain of weekly photographic announcements for Time mag called “Detroit`s Beautiful, Horrible Decline,” photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre had been revealing the size of deterioration in Detroit. “The kingdom of break is basically a brief scenario that occurs at a few point, the unstable end result of extrude of generation and the autumn of empires,” write Marchand and Meffre. “Photography regarded to us as a modest manner to maintain a bit little bit of this ephemeral kingdom.” As Detroit’s white centre magnificence maintains to desert the metropolis middle for its dispersed suburbs, and its downtown high-rises empty out, those remarkable images, which deliver each the imperious grandeur of the metropolis’s structure and its sincerely surprising decline, maintain a second that warns us all the transience of super epochs.

Why have I chosen this artist?

The quality of their work cannot be disagreed, and they have added great value to the medium of photography. I like the way they take photos of completely different places, places that no one hardly goes. Where its nice and calm or sometimes messy but still calm and peaceful.

Who was Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre inspired by?

Marchand and Meffre are both influenced by the typological and full aspects of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher and the German photographers of Industrie-Kultur, as well as the large-format images of Robert Polidori.

“Now these cathedrals of industry lie shattered, broken and forgotten, tombs to man’s hubris, a reminder that nothing lasts forever, a reminder that we all will perish and rot one day.”

How does their work relate to the theme of Anthropocene?

It relates to Anthropocene because they take pictures of mostly abandone places and that shows how places can be detroyed or not wanted anymore because of the environment, could also be because of war or other any reason.