Mandy Barker photographs plastic that the ocean has thrown back. Collected debris, sorted and lit with evident care, becomes an image that is difficult to look away from — which is precisely the point. Her stated aim is to widen public awareness of the environmental crisis by letting aesthetically attractive pictures carry evolving scientific research, and the friction between pleasure and alarm is the engine of the work.
Altered Ocean, published by Overlapse in 2019, is the fullest gathering of that project: it collects the photographic work Barker has made on plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, and it draws on roughly a decade of production. It is also, deliberately, more than a plate section. A foreword by Barker opens the book; Professor Richard Thompson OBE, the Plymouth marine scientist whose research has fed into legislation on microbeads and other forms of plastic pollution, supplies the introduction; and Liz Wells, professor in photographic culture, contributes an essay, “Picturing Plastic Oceans.” Text and image are asked to do the same job.
The third strand is process. An extensive survey of Barker’s own working sketchbooks runs alongside the finished photographs, so that the sorting, testing and research preceding the camera remain visible. A reader sees not only what she photographed but how the subject was constructed as an argument — photographs, text and sketches held in one volume.
For a collector, the case rests on documented facts rather than speculation. This is the first edition, hardcover, 144 pages at 19.5 x 27 cm, with a section-sewn binding; the publisher now lists it as out of print. The book also gives durable form to work that has travelled through exhibitions, educational outreach and media coverage, and it is unusual in publishing both the finished images and the research apparatus behind them together.
Barker’s photographs do not accuse the viewer. They seduce first, then explain. That sequence — attraction, then comprehension — is what makes the book worth returning to, and what makes this edition worth holding.
