Mandy Barker - Beyond Drifting

1st edition published by Overlapse, 2017
Format: Hardback, 175x235mm
Pages: 104
Condition: Very Good

A fine art photobook highlighting environmental disaster with a unique collection of plankton 'specimen' photographs, revealed to be beautifully photographed objects of plastic debris recovered off the southern shores of Ireland. The antique design reflects on a time before plastic while exposing the urgent issue of severe pollution in our natural marine environment.

* This series of work was shortlisted for 2017 Prix Pictet, the global award in photography and sustainability
* Publication nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018
* Selected by Smithsonian Magazine: The Ten Best Photography Books of 2017

“Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals is an astounding piece of work, one in which Barker takes the most humdrum of things – plastic detrius – inserts it into an intriguing, multilayered historical narrative, lends its physical form a gossamer, airy beauty, and presents the whole to us in the form of a book. Not just any book, but a replica of an old science publication from the 1800s, including mould-spotted pages, a library lending form and specimen labels.” – Lucy Davies, V&A Magazine

“Mandy Barker’s work on plastic has been developing for some time. In its latest advance, she looks at micro-particles of plastic as a species of a lunatic plankton, floating about the sea, and she has included a rather wonderful pastiche book of old-fashioned science as a way of getting us into her subject.” – Francis Hodgson, Photography critic

“Her images could be mistaken for Victorian glass-plate photographs; in fact they are ornate, long-exposure studies of the plastic debris that pollutes beaches in and around Cobh in Cork Harbour, Ireland.” – Tom Seymour, British Journal of Photography