Walking with Waste by Photographer Jack Vine
Ross Clifton chats with Jack Vine about his newest work Walking With Waste, and his influences as a photographer.
Jack Vine is BA Photography graduate from Falmouth University and is currently working on his Master’s at Kingston University. You may recognise his name from a previous interview he did for Bloom in Doom with Hannah Varney, our Visuals Director. His most recent work is titled Walking with Waste and focuses on displaying the “hidden waste” that often goes unnoticed.
I spoke to Jack about his influences and how they have affected his current project.
A lot of the waste in the environment is hidden, only viewable when you're truly looking for it. 3 walks, 3 and a half miles, 1945 pieces of waste. Image from Walking with Waste, by Jack Vine.
Why do you think photography is the best medium for you to convey a message?
Photography is so good at capturing just the world around us and being able to capture truths. It can be quite problematic in that sense as it is quite easily editable and you do not know what is going on outside of the camera lens off to the side, there is a lot of tension about when the camera tells truths or not.
But the way that I use it, especially in my most recent project, Walking with Waste, there is only that truth within the frame - the truth of this hidden pollution and littering within local environments. And that is the truth that I am seeking to capture and convey to audiences to make them aware of these issues which are just outside their doorstep.
Who do you look up to or take influence from in your work?
I took a lot from the photographer Nicholas Hughes. He is a fantastic photographer who taught me at the BTEC level. The way that he uses landscapes and negative space to convey messages I think is fantastic. He takes most of his images on walks close to his home in Cornwall, and that inspired me to look closer to my home when I shot Walking with Waste. This method really highlighted to me the huge amount of waste littered across the natural environment even in remote areas of the countryside, and that the problem is not something that is “far away”, but actually right on my doorstep.
Chris Jordan was a big source of influence for Walking with Waste. One of his most famous projects is Midway Message from Gyre. And those photographs are of albatrosses on Midway Atoll that had ingested plastic pollution and sadly died. And he influenced that way of documenting the pieces of waste from a very top-down documentary perspective. There are not really any romantic elements within the images, they are very direct. What you are seeing is exactly what happened - there is no beating around the bush or messing around with it. It is like, here is the issue, here is how it is affecting our world, and it conveys to an audience that it is something that we need to be worried about.
I took that influence with my own work. Midway Atoll is a very famous and beautiful place, but I think it is sometimes hard for people to relate to these images of waste in the Mariana Trench or the waste in other very remote places because we have never been there, we don’t know what it’s like. Whereas taking images of waste within a mile radius of where I was living, that is direct. And it makes it much more relatable to an audience living in an urban or suburban setting. That is also why I have put no sense of place within these images. There is no landmark to say where these images are because that makes it a lot more relatable to anybody. Just having it as a patch of nature framing the images allows people to think “that could be right on my doorstep”. You know, even if you are living in a city area, you are still going to have parks and stuff where this would be relatable.
Regarding your latest work, Walking with Waste, where did the idea come from and what message would you like it to convey?
Before Walking with Waste, I was really struggling with where to go with my work after previous works like The Dead of Spring and Melting Money. And I just went out and started taking photographs. And I started to notice how much waste was around my local area.
So I started going on walks and taking photographs of the waste and it was really surprising, once I started looking for it, how much waste I started to find. I went on three walks that spanned a three-and-a-half-mile linear walk, not a radius, just a straight line, and I found 1945 pieces of waste. That is a shocking amount! Three and a half miles is not far, and where I was photographing, I was on country lanes, they are not built-up main roads, these were all quiet country lanes. So, if that is what you can find within a very small and quiet road, what is it going to be like further afield where there are more cars, there are more people walking with more consumer waste being dropped just everywhere? And so, I just started to start photographing all this waste and it started just getting bigger and bigger, and more and more, until the project got to the state that it is now with the massive amount of images. That is the whole message that I wanted to convey. I am not trying to say anything deep or meaningful, I am not trying to deconstruct the human condition in any way, I am just trying to raise awareness of the waste that is closer to home, perhaps the truth about the amount of waste there is. And the idea of keying people into this idea of this hidden waste as well. Because you do not notice it until you start looking for it. You know, I could have walked down that road a couple of days before having this idea and I would not have noticed half of the waste. So, when I present the work in a gallery space, there will be just hundreds of images spanning across a wall, to display how massive the issue is. And I hope it will help the audience reflect on the effect they can have. Are they part of that problem? And how can they help fix that problem?
“I am not trying to say anything deep or meaningful, I am not trying to deconstruct the human condition in any way, I am just trying to raise awareness of the waste that is closer to home, perhaps the truth about the amount of waste there is ”
Where can readers find more about your previous, current, and upcoming work?
I am currently working on making Walking with Waste into a zine which is going to play more with the juxtaposition of a pristine landscape and this landscape that I am presenting within the work. That is going to be a separate thing from the project itself, which is just going to play with more romantic images alongside these documentary-style, straightforward images. The zine is still in the works, but when it is ready, people can just message me on Instagram at @jack_vine_photography to buy a copy, or look at my website at jackvinephotography.com.
I am currently also working on a project with the working title of Hiraeth - a Welsh word that loosely translates to a nostalgic longing for a home that no longer exists. For this project, I will be making very experimental images and a fine art film, which will be looking in towards more complicated emotions, similar to what my previous work Bright Blue Haze was about.
Jack Vine
Jack Vine is a graduate from Falmouth University specialising in photography and is currently studying his MA at Kingston University. At heart, he is a Fine Art Photographer but recently he has been exploring his love for moving image in his professional and personal work. While not a stranger to studio work, his works consist mainly of the natural world, preferring to use his environment as the canvas to project his inner thoughts and feeling. You can find Jack on Instagram @jack_vine_photography
Ross Clifton
Ross is an MSc and BSc (Hons) Conservation graduate from the University of Exeter, and is currently based in Cornwall. He is an avid homebrewer and cook and enjoys making new things as it is an opportunity for him to learn and share with others. He is a firm believer in pragmatic sustainability and has a strong interest in wildlife conservation, aspiring to work in this field in future.