Mandy Barker is a British photographer, who is mostly known for her work with plastic and litter from the ocean. She has also worked with scientists to try and attract attention and awareness to the extremely large amount of plastic that ends up in the sea.

When taking her photos, she uses artificial lighting to focus on one piece of litter per image, ensuring that it is the one and only focal point. The image become abstract, colourful and textured. Your eye is drawn to each one, wondering what it is against the stark black background. She captures them in a way that they look like they are still floating around in the ocean pointlessly. The black, negative space frames each item and creates an endless background. It also allows the vibrant colours to stand out, enhancing their artificial characteristic.

“On first impression these images are strikingly beautiful; saturated rainbow bits of colour organised into decorative ensembles. Clearly this is a construct to deceive the viewer, was that your original intention setting out? Or how did your ideas evolve?“

Mandy Baker’s deliberate placement of the garbage, transforms it into something beautiful. Sometimes the patterns are geometric, and other times their placement looks more organic, like planets floating in an endless universe. Plastics never decompose but biodegrade into smaller fragments. The explosion of plastic in her images, exaggerate this notion.

My intention aesthetically was for Barker to attract people to the image and for them to question what it represented. In recognising that what they were looking at was their own waste collected from our ocean, viewers would have a more lasting impact and message of awareness.