When photographer Mandy Barker arrived to sign copies of her latest book at the Photo London art fair in May wearing clothes she had found washed ashore around the UK coast, she was making a political statement as much as a fashion one.
“All my work is political,” says Barker, who for the past 15 years has documented the growth in plastic waste polluting the world’s oceans, now estimated at some 1.7mn tonnes a year. “It’s to reach people who could do something about the problem and ultimately for countries to get together and to provide legislation to manage plastic consumption.”
While Barker’s previous work featured large scale photo-collages of washed-up plastics, including footballs, toys, toothbrushes and printer cartridges she had collated from shorelines around the world, her latest photo book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections takes aim at the $150bn fast fashion industry.
Presenting more than 200 abstract cyanotype prints of clothing Barker found washed up along the UK coastline, the title is a homage to the 1843 book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions by pioneering English photographer Anna Atkins. Cyanotypes are made by arranging negatives or objects on paper coated in iron salts which, once exposed to UV light and developed, appear outlined on a blue background.
The process for Barker’s book began in 2012 when the photographer, based in Leeds in the north of England, found what she initially believed to be a piece of seaweed on the nearby East Yorkshire coast. Barker was shocked when she realised that the item was actually a strip of polyester clothing.
“When I picked it up, it was the exact shape of a piece of seaweed, properly tapered like a leaf,” she says. “I collect large pieces of plastic and didn’t really think about the synthetic textile aspect of plastic pollution.”
Propelled by data from consultancy McKinsey showing that the fast fashion industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined, Barker spent the next 10 years collecting washed-up fragments of T-shirts, dresses, trousers, underwear and trainers at beaches around Britain.
During that time, the pace of fashion has become turbocharged by the arrival of so-called ultrafast fashion online retailers, including Chinese-owned Shein and Temu. While fast fashion retailers such as Zara, Uniqlo and H&M may typically launch hundreds of new items of clothing each week, Shein can drop up to 10,000 new designs per day. By 2020, McKinsey estimated that clothing waste already contributed 20-35 per cent of all microplastics polluting the world’s oceans.
Sensing the public was increasingly unmoved by images of marine debris, a breakthrough for Barker came during a visit to the Royal Society in London when she discovered Atkins’ 1843 work. Considered to be the first book to be illustrated with photographs, it contains 389 hand-printed cyanotype plates of seaweed.
For Barker, Atkins’ book was a revelation. “A lot of the clothing pieces I was finding were exactly like seaweed, so it was almost a natural progression to relate a current climate issue against the 1800s when synthetic clothing wasn’t around,” says Barker. “It’s that relationship to history and how we’ve changed.”
From her studio in Leeds, Barker recreated Atkins’ process meticulously, even printing on the same brand of paper from the 19th century. Editing down the thousands of strips of clothing she had collected to create negatives for her own cyanotypes, Barker shifted between compositions mimicking the algae in Atkins’ prints almost identically, to more obvious depictions of the clothing in question.
“The first 20, you can’t really tell the difference between what I’ve done and Atkins’ work,” says Barker. “I wanted people to think that they’re looking at her work, then it was a bit of a shock, a stab in the back that actually it’s a T-shirt or some underwear; it’s not actually algae.”
In the past 15 years, Barker’s commitment to photographing plastic waste has been recognised worldwide, including with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal Photographic Society and, this week, during the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in Nice.
For Atkins, however, such recognition would remain elusive in her lifetime. Not until the 1970s was she revealed to be the author of Cyanotype Impressions, her initials, “AA” having long been misconstrued as the then more common abbreviation “anonymous amateur”.
“Women didn’t get any credibility for creating that kind of work,” says Barker, for whom Cyanotype Imperfections, besides bringing attention to fast fashion waste, is also a means of drawing new audiences to Atkins’ pioneering use of photography.
“This was the first photographic book ever illustrated with just photographs, so it’s an incredible achievement to have done that,” Barker says. “If this brings more attention to her work and her as a person, then that’s what I would hope for.”
Hope was a recurrent theme at Barker’s book signing at Photo London and has been at her exhibitions around the world. She is encouraged when patrons tell her of the changes they’ve made to reduce plastic consumption in their own lives, such as the support she received when she didn’t buy clothing for a year while creating the images for the book.
“The whole point of this is to reach people, to make them think about what they consume on a daily basis, a weekly basis and a monthly basis in terms of clothing: little sparks of hope from people and just the fact that people are genuinely concerned,” she says.
For Barker, the scale of the challenge means pessimism is not an option. “I have to have hope.”
‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections’ is published by GOST; mandy-barker.com/atkins-barker
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