Algae or underwear? Mandy Barker documents the fast fashion waste polluting our seas

Growing up in Hull on the east coast of England, photographic artist Mandy Barker spent a lot of her time as a child exploring the local coastline and “collecting natural objects” like sea glass and driftwood, she tells us. Over time, she began to notice more and more man-made waste washing up on the shore – waves of plastic pollution swept up into our oceans.

Now, following a master’s in photography that shaped her outlook on art as a “powerful form of communication to educate, inform and increase awareness”, Mandy has dedicated the last 15 years of her creative practice to making photographic work that raises awareness of the issue, with global recognition. Working with scientists, the photographer’s work “aims to raise awareness about plastic pollution in the world's oceans, to highlight the harmful effect on marine life, climate change, and ultimately ourselves, leading the viewer to take action”, she shares.

In her latest photobook, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections, set to be published in April by Gost Books, the artist has explored the effects of the fast fashion industry on the climate, with a delicate typology of images of discarded clothing fragments found on the coast of the UK.

The project started back in 2012 when Mandy found a piece of material in a rock pool. “That changed my life,” she says. “Mistaking this moving piece of cloth for seaweed, I started the recovery of synthetic clothing from around the coastline of Britain for the next ten years.” Reconnecting with her childhood habit of shoreline scavenging, Mandy uncovered clothing from 121 beaches from coasts in the far north of Scotland all the way to Land’s End in the south of England, recovering 200 fabric samples of waste clothing.

Disintegrated, warped and weathered, these seaweed-like textile samples were derived from everything from trainers and football shirts, to underwear, “representative of millions of tonnes of clothes manufactured and discarded each year, sometimes without being worn at all”, says Mandy. It was important that this act of uncovering took place in a wide range of locations across the country to properly present synthetic clothing found in the sea to be a pertinent form of plastic pollution. “I didn’t only find socks or items that could have been left by someone visiting the beach,” she says. “I recovered clothing identified from different eras like the 1970s.”

The artist then took these found fabric forms through the cyanotype process, creating a series of detailed photogram prints in the process’ idiosyncratic Prussian blue. Inspired by the work of Victorian botanist and photographer Anna Atkins – who made use of the cyanotype process to document botanical specimens in her pioneering 1843 book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions – Mandy painstakingly created “a replica of the original publication with 202 illustrations, each with the botanical specimen substituted with found garments or fibres”. She gave her own version of the publication a new title: Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections.

In the same way that Atkins’ work “illustrated the potential of photography and changed how people looked at science in the 1800s”, Mandy’s recreation of the book aims to connect people with “the present-day consequences of climate change”. Her print method of cyanotypes feels even more fitting years on, making Mandy’s fabric samples suspended in blue appear as if submerged under the sea.

By gathering a collection of samples from a coastline that is several thousand miles long, Mandy hoped to demonstrate that no area of natural beauty along the UK’s shore “is exempt from plastic pollution”. It’s by no means a local problem, rather one on a global scale. “I see the series and this point as a discussion point, a call to action,” concludes Mandy. “Whether the book ends up on a coffee table or book shelf, it is my intention that conversation around the project will increase awareness of the industry’s impact.”