Critical Appraisal: Commision

Rubbish, trash, refuse, garbage, junk and litter, those are only the word but according to our environment they are the worst words ever.

Surrounding us world getting polluted so quickly, as people don’t care at all where and what they throwing away.

My biggest influence for Commission project was Pieter Hugo series ‘Premanent Error’.

He photographed people and landscapes of an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. Thing which attracted my attention was hands of those people.

They are working hard, burning heavy duty objects, which are harming their health; and they are not using any protection.

Because of that  I focused on hands. As they are exposed to damage, and obviously people are using them to grab the objects and burn them up.

In my project I decided to take photographs of the hands of Medway cleaners. Nowadays they're using protection for their hands, but still I think is not enough and through their hands we still can see that they work so hard to tidy up what we messed up.

I looked at photographs by photographers such as: Pieter Hugo (above), Jonas Bendiksen, Tomasz Gudzowaty, Zwelethu Mthethwa. Their photographed slum areas around the word shows how hard people work for very little money; they are not able to think about any protection for themselves.

Back to the 19^th Century to the realistic paintings of the gleaners; such as Jean-Francois Millets painting 'The Gleaners’ or Peter Henry Emersons 'In the Barley Harvest'.

People appearing in those paintings have naked hands during quite ‘dirty’ and hard work. Unfortunately we can’t see their hands in detail but if so, they suppose to be dirty, tired and damaged.

For my final images I took photographs of Medway cleaners hands and tools.

Firstly  I want to show that this job in not a shame and the cleaners taking a really big part in environment. It is not a easy job, as they need quite a lot to clean. Unfortunately people in Britain loooks like they are not used to of recycle or even to put their rubbish to the bins.   

Because nobody is paying attention to the rubbish and the cleaners I took pictures of the tools which they are using. They are supporting BW images, where I highlighted the objects to make a connection and to force people to start lookining at the cleaners with a bit more respect.

And secondly I wanted to recall about the slums areas around the world, where people works so hard to clean up our mess, to recycle plastic which is mixed with metal, because nobody else care. Those people are working like little ants, trying to survive and to save our planet.