Another project I looked at through lens culture was Heather Mcdonough’s project called ‘carrier’ in which she photographed carrier bags that are stuck in the trees. Each carrier bag is a different colour trapped in a different shape.
I like how heather has used natural light to shine through the bags emphasising their colour and material. I also like the different angles that she has managed to capture and the different backdrops in some of the photos. All of the images are taken from a low angle as they are caught in the trees so the photos are naturally taken from below, however, the framing of the photos are all different. Some are off to the side, some are more central and zoomed in, some are taken from further back and fit the whole bag in the image. I think this makes the images very natural and you can tell the images aren’t staged, the different positions and backgrounds of the images show that the bags have just blown away in the wind and got caught which I think is what the aim of the pictures are. They are mean to be real and authentic, capturing the way plastic is polluting the earth and where it can end up if not recycled properly.
I really like this style of documentary photography and I decided to experiment with some of my own version of this project testing different shapes and angels of plastic bags in the tree in my garden.
As you can see from my own images I only used one plain white bag as I wanted to make sure I was using plastic waste that was already around our house rather than adding more plastic pollution to the world by buying more plastic bags. I also had staged these images by hanging the bag in the tree myself rather than having the bag naturally fall into the tree to save time and to give me more freedom to experiment with different angles and shots, however if I were to do this style in my final project then I would want to I enjoyed practising this style of photography however I did feel like if I focused my project just on plastic bags, it would limit the shots I would get and the narrative I wanted to tell.
Leave a Reply