In artist Mandy Barker’s new book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype imperfections, she uses the same technique as the botanist and pioneering photographer Anna Atkins to draw attention to the ongoing pollution crisis facing our oceans. Like Atkins nearly two centuries earlier, Barker scoured the British coastline for items to image. Rather than finding natural beauty, however, she saw discarded clothing washing up onto the beaches. Her first find, she says, looked like seaweed. “It was kind of an attractive, beautiful piece of cloth.” But as pieces of jackets, dresses, shoes, underwear and school uniforms started appearing, the scale of the problem quickly became apparent to her.
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