You Don’t Want This

In an effort to improve my low mood, I took to walking along the shore near my home in Cardross, where I wanted to make images of the beauty of nature, to reflect on how life-enhancing these walks were. More and more I realised that I was employing every photographic trick in the book to try and exclude the rubbish that I didn’t want to see in my shots, much of it single-use items, largely made of plastic which were threatening to drown out any natural elements. Not only did I feel bad about this, but it was also becoming an increasingly difficult task as with every tide a new batch of other people’s rubbish was brought in for all to see.

It occurred to me that excluding what was really there, denying the true state of the shoreline was an exercise in dishonesty, and that didn’t sit right with me. I began to document what was really there. Initially, I took a ‘straight’ approach and photographed the debris with none of the techniques I’d been using to get beautiful photographs of flowers and so on. The result was the same images we have all seen of grimy unpleasant items that we don’t really want to think about; images that should have been shocking but which I realised I was pretty much used to seeing now.

It was this acknowledgement of my own complacency that prompted me to try something different. The next part of the process was to shoot one item of rubbish for every shot of something uplifting. I think I hoped that by pairing the shots it would go some way to redress he balance. But it soon became obvious to me that this was a ludicrous idea. We weren’t dealing with these sorts of ratios and I was really discouraged to realise that there was far more photographic material to be found in the waste and debris than in the natural flora and fauna that I wanted for my subject matter.

I really felt that I only had one way forward, and that was to stop using all those photographic tricks to hide the rubbish, and use them to show it off instead. Some people have questioned my choice to make aesthetically pleasing images from the pollution I was wading through, but if we don’t want to acknowledge, and aren’t pricked by ugly scenes of the things we’ve thrown away, perhaps making them beautiful will prompt the question of what happens when we are still desperately seeking beauty to salve our soul, but this is all that’s left to photograph.