Oceanic Mystique

In 2018, I began a photographic reportage documenting the comedy and tragedy of objects I discovered, to my dismay, left behind, ignored, or washed ashore along the beachfront. For me, questions emerged: Does environmental preservation, ecosystem conservation, or issues of mass consumerism really matter to us? How attentive are we of our surroundings? Do we really care?

The pictorials I create of marine debris examines both human behavior and the physical transformation human-made solid materials undergo when found along coastlines. My approach is to seek fresh ways of visually articulating the ever-rising derelict pollutant that is waterway flotsam, mass consumer waste, and its effect on the earth’s biological community while simultaneously attempting to answer those questions. The imagery I continue to amass has changed how I perceive and engage with the world around me. Each image of a seemingly banal piece of trash oddly becomes a philosophical wonderment, an elevated image of geometric beauty possessing the stark reminder of its destructive, contaminant voyage prior to meeting my lens.

In Oceanic Mystique, I unabashedly take an aesthetically minimalistic approach to this photography with a purpose, one that is both satirical in visual absurdity, yet mysterious in its identity or origin. Using light, shadow, and reflection, I turn fragments of marine debris into alluring, seductive objets d’art. In this way, I intimately glamorize and romanticize our ceaseless love of beach trash while continuing to directly confront the global social conscience about our collective environmental duplicity within capitalist consumerism and materialistic ideologies.