ENSNARED
HIGHLIGHTING AN ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN
A childhood spent on the Suffolk coastline gave me a respect, a love, for the sea. The ocean is inescapable in the east - the strip of coast is scarred by the many towns that we've lost to the time and the tide. But the sea is one of the reasons that the nature of the county is so diverse, and I've always found it to be a place of wonder. A deep desire to address the issues that affect the world's oceans focused my thoughts for this piece.
The State of the Sea
It's a well documented fact that we, as humans, have been very neglectful of the world we live in. Advances in technology have come at the expense of natural ecosystems, and every year there's news of some man-made disaster that has far-reaching effects on wildlife (think the Sea Empress, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the Deepwater Horizon oil spill). Despite this, there is still reluctance from many in power to even acknowledge the damage we're doing, let alone trying to combat it.
There are a great number of wildlife photographers who are out there and bringing global attention to these concerns at ground (or sea) level. Without the work and dedication of these individuals a vast majority of issues would remain unknown and unreported. One of the particular inspirations for my final piece is an image by Brian Skerry of a thresher shark caught in a gillnet. It's a very powerful image, and one that really resonated with me as soon as I saw it.
Thresher shark caught in a gillnet - Brian Skerry, 2017
Creating Ensnared
I believe that one of the main reasons that there's a resistance to do anything about the state of nature, and our affect on it, is because the victims are non-human. People will tell themselves that it doesn't matter if thousands of seabirds die in an oil spill because they don't matter. But they're wrong. To combat this disconnect I chose to use a human model in my piece. People respond to people and I felt that using a human would help some viewers to make an emotional connection with my image, and the issue it represents. I decided that there were an number of issues that I wanted to draw people's attention to, so I planned a shoot to cover the topics of oil spills, disused fishing nets and plastic pollution.
This project marked the first time that I ever used a human model in my work, which provided a unique set of challenges for me to work around. Trying to work out how to translate issues faced by the natural world was an interesting process, and one that required a proper test run ahead of the real shoot - huge thanks to my housemate Sarah for putting up with that (check out my vlog if you want to see what antics we got up to).
The Final Shoot
I travelled to Liverpool to complete my final shoot. This decision was made mostly because my model lives there, but there are also really lovely areas of coast around the Wirral which seemed an appropriate environment for my topic.
As a practitioner I'm a firm believer in only asking people to do things that I'm willing to do myself. I was aware that for this shoot I was asking for my model to do some rather odd things - in particular to pose with a piece of plastic in their nostril. So I showed my model how the process would work on myself before ensuring that they were still happy to go ahead. They were and this result in another striking image, which I was very pleased with.
Below you can see a selection of behind the scenes images from the shoot as well as some of the other end images which, sadly, couldn't be included in my final portfolio.
Huge thanks to Naomi, Margaret and Katherine (my mum) for making this project possible!
Project Mood Board
