“Shoal,” a collage photo series by UK-based photographer Mandy Barker, showcases the devastation caused by Japan’s massive 2011 tsunami. The images feature debris from the natural disaster that she collected while sailing across the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii to Fukushima, Japan. On her journey, she collected found objects—plastic, shoes, cups, syringes, coat hangers, hats, and various other particles that were floating in the open water. For her series, she arranged the debris in formations based on schools of different species of fish that the debris had certainly affected. She then duplicated the debris arrangements to symbolize the great number of individuals who perished in the flood. The name of the series, "Shoal," is a Japanese word that means mourning or grieving. Indeed, her series is meant to call people’s attention to the tragedy of the horrific natural disaster. “The unidentified plastic particles seem to represent people, and similarities are seen in the plastics collected… a twisted bottleneck like a flower, a plastic tag like a butterfly, a reminder of life from retrieved pieces, not only from what objects they have been, and where they have come from, but more importantly from whom they belonged,” Barker says of her work.
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[via DesignBoom]
