planet earth
PLASTIC AND OCEANS Text and photos Karola Takes Photos
Plastic. It is widely known that we have a problem with it. It’s in the woods, it’s in the snow, in the mountains, it’s in the deserts, underground, above the ground, in rivers, streams and of course in the oceans. Everywhere. And I see it most often in the water.
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don’t think I’ve ever had a dive from which I would return without garbage in my pocket, gathered from the bottom of the sea or caught drifting freely in the blue. It is sad and sometimes even terrifying. Here in Indonesia this problem is much larger than in e.g. Europe. Lack of eco-education and messy habits have led to the fact that after every rainfall, plastic is washed out of the islands and brought by the stream of rivers to the sea. Many times I’ve strolled on the beach after a storm and I just wanted to cry, because it was full of garbage. I remember the 90s in Poland when we had a huge problem with garbage. It was also everywhere. 30 years have passed and it is a lot better (although there are idiots who will load the trailer after renovations or spring cleaning and woosh! dump into the woods, because no one can see them in the woods and this is “a free service”. Shameful!). The problem in Asia is much bigger because people’s awareness is different, of course, the problem is global, I don’t even want to mention factories that pollute environment around the
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world, or send container ships with waste to developing countries, global warming, but also our own habits. Think about it in this way: let’s say twenty years ago you were in a grocery store and you got a disposable plastic bag, this bag and every other plastic bag you have ever used in your life is still lying somewhere or drifting in the blue. When I realized that, I felt ashamed that I used to take a plastic bag every time, because I had no idea how truly evil it was. All of this and more inspired me to create a photo session entitled “TRAPPED”. It is a series of photographs of beautiful women cornered, bound, surrounded, drowning in plastic. I wanted to show nature as a beautiful woman who is trapped in various types of plastic traps and can’t escape. Red accents make these photographs stronger. Red colour symbolizes extreme values like femininity, passion, vitality, life, beauty, revolution, struggle and anger. In the photographs we use waste we have personally collected from the beaches and reefs