THE PROJECT.
Litter Patients is a project which has been created together with Danny Rottier. The concept was created to make humans aware of the risks for animals in a city. By seeing your own species suffer the consequenses of your littering, we hope to break through the pattern of human littering.
The concept was to be exhibited at Valkenberg park in Breda; a city in The Netherlands. The photos would be presented on large billboards with patient data to humanize animals and by that create more empathy for them. The exhibition would also contain a rack of bio degradable flyers to present more information about the project, and provide a call to action.
RESEARCH
The research started in Valkenberg park in Breda. There I looked for the amount an kinds of litter. There were cigarettes, bottles, plastic bags, cans and much more. And all in the direct environment of ducks, geese, dog, and pigeons.
CONCEPTUALIZING
I experimented with different kinds of risks for animals. From animal sculptures which show the effects of trash to the effects of traffic on animals. And that is what this concept is about. This concept provides a provocative and absurdistic perspective on how weird it is that humans are allowed to run over animals without any consequenses, so i decided to swap the roles in this concept.
DEEPENING
Danny and I liked the perspective I created in the previous concept, but it was a bit too absurd. Then I got the idea to create a concept for which we would create a photo series in which the roles of animal and human are swapped. So instead of the images by Greenpeace of animals trapped in litter, we would create images of humans trapped in litter. For that we did more research on the effects of specific types of trash on animals.
PHOTOGRAPHING
We went into a photostudio to take the photo's for our concept. First we collected and processed certain forms of trash so we could use them for our photo's.
EDITING
After taking the foto's it was time to edit them and make a selection. We made the photo's look less yellow and boosted the white tones within our photo's.
FINISHING
After the photo's were finished, we had to make the project ready for the exposition. We added the photo's of animals trapped in litter underneath our own photo's. Beside that we added some patient information about the animal trapped in the trash to make the visitors of our exposition empathize with the animals that got stuck, or hurt by the litter
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