Plastic Pollution

Camera Practise 

So after gaining a lot of inspiration from my research, I decide to try experimenting the use of documentary images and photo journalism. I want my images to tell a story of the effect plastic has on the environment and the spaces in which we live in. I wanted to create images which will hopefully tell a story and having meaning. Unlike typical documentary photos, I plan on adding a bit more of an abstract twist into my images, instead of capturing plastic in the physical habitats of animals, I thought it would be an interesting idea to capture them within my own home to symbolise the waste which gets caught up in the homes of animals and the inconvenience it causes.

“describing the world in which we live but cannot wholly see” (Drew 2005:64) 

Although my images are actually documenting the reality of the waste that gets dumped I our oceans, they convey the reality what it must be like to have your home full of rubbish and how this effects the spaces we live in. I took pictures of plastic rubbish cluttered over my sofa, desk, bed and other places around my home which would cause an inconvenience to me if it were there all the time in an attempt to try and portray how this may feel to ocean animals in their environment.

I took some practise shots, testing my ideas in places like the bath and my living room to test lighting and composition for my final images.

I liked the concept of the plastic floating around in the bath just like how it floats around in the sea but the also the different angles of the plastic build stacked up on my coffee table to represent the rubbish being washed up on the shore. I really like the aesthetic of the images and the different angles in which I captured. The higher angle of the floating plastic to enphasise the notion of floating and then and also the closer lower angled of the plastic hit by the natural light from my window.

I feel like this way of capturing my research allows a more visually pleasing interpretation of my research, telling the narrative from a different perspective.

“Rigorous and careful way of documenting visual appearances and relating them to social processes which with a reflective discussion of the coding process, can certainly work as a visual methodology” (Gillian 2011:304)

The visual images I plan to capture as well as the research I have already conducted on my blog go hand in hand telling the story in which I want to convey and it creates a more interesting insight into my research by trying to place the audience in the place of the animals.