Plastic Soup Starts Here is a photography project by Floris Kok who lives on a house boat in the canals of Amsterdam. It was his graduation project for his photography education and was rewarded with an excellent grade.
For my graduation, I started looking for a major theme that is also close to me. The environment and the quality of our world oceans has my personal interest. During research into possible subjects I noticed that the phenomenon of plastic soup is mainly approached and represented as a problem far away, caused by large polluters such as China. This while immediately outside our own front door there is already an inhuman pile of plastic floating in the water. This is what I want to make clear; Plastic Soup starts here!
The name of the series is Plastic Soup Starts Here. With this series of seven compositions of plastic floating waste I want to make clear that plastic soup is not a problem that takes place far from our front door (the North Atlantic Ocean), but that the cause and thus part of the solution starts directly outside our own front door.
To make this clear, I fished a few cubic meters of plastic floating waste from the municipal waters of Amsterdam over a period of three months. By doing this myself it also shows that a single person can make a difference in cleaning up this plastic.
By subsequently taking this plastic waste out of context and photographing it on a smooth surface in a tight composition, I want to seduce the viewer with an aesthetic and visual image to think about the amount and variety of plastic waste that floats from our living environment via our own waterways into the world’s oceans.
After subdividing all waste in the studio according to type, colour, shape or function, I started making compositions on the surface through an intuitive process. First a rough sketch with the material itself and then an increasingly detailed elaboration in which form, free black space and mutual relationships of the material were leading. This was a process of 1 to several days per composition.
Then I went in search of an even lighting with the studio light that matched the specific composition in terms of shadow and brightness. To capture a visually powerful image I photographed this right from above through a special construction where the camera hung about 4 meters above the composition.
About me
I started my working life in the (international) hotel industry. After London, Beijing and Amsterdam I had a gallery in which I sold Non-Western tribal art.
In 2013 I decided to follow my heart and I enrolled in the Photography Design course at the Fotovakschool Amsterdam. This was perhaps the best decision of my life. My many years of hobby has now become a passion and way of looking at the world around me. The universe of photography appears to be infinite.
At this point in my development as a photographer I am very interested in depicting human stories without the human being physically present. Man is omnipresent in our world. He leaves his traces everywhere, has a great influence on the landscape and the environment in which he lives and makes a big statement through the material that he produces.
It contains all human emotions and feelings, and on the basis of this you can imagine beautiful stories that go beyond an eye-to-eye portrait. My provisional focus is therefore on documentary still life and conceptual product photography.
I do not reject people in my photography; I just shift the emphasis to his actions and environmental influences to show his story.