Benjamin Von Wong may be many things, but he can never be accused of being boring. Whenever he presents a new project you know it’s gonna be at the least impressive and more than likely astounding.
His latest entry is no different, involving 10,000 plastic bottles and mermaids.
“One of my greatest strength as an artist is that I am often too naive to realize how crazy my ideas are,” Von Wong says.
/Anna Tenne
The images depict the flippered water nymphs frolicking, with a downwards camera perspective creating a false ocean out of decorative bottles. However the goal behind this particular work is more than just spectacle and is in fact, deeply personal. We’ve seen Von Wong dally with lava flows, bait sharks with models, and chase raging storms. Nature quite often provides the paint palette for his most dramatic scenes. The mermaid project attempts to bring awareness to man’s excess and the fragility of the natural world around us.
According to Von Wong’s research, in a single year the average American will use 167 plastic bottles. In 60 years the total number would reach 10,000. These plastic bottles are not biodegradable and could still be present as waste in hundreds of years. Von Wong wanted to find a way to show that terrifying statistic in a visual way. Or how he puts it, “All I knew was that plastic pollution was a boring topic and I had to find a way to make it more interesting. ”
/Benjamin Von Wong
Enlisting his girlfriend and an army of volunteers, Von Wong set out to work with a mountain of plastic. Von Wong explains that his friend and producer, Didier Kaade, arranged for the procurement of 10,000 bottles by calling up several waste management centres to pitch the project. Eventually one of them, Tomra, agreed. “They even offered to drop them off for us in a 50 foot truck, no strings attached,” says Von Wong. Another acquaintance freely provided the massive warehouse space required to store the plastic haul.
It was indeed a spirit of goodwill that kept this project moving. The team on site was initially friends and family but soon complete strangers from Von Wong’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter appeared. Once local news started reporting, even more people arrived. Yet it still took several days of work for the team to de-label, un-cap, and clean every single bottle they had gathered. It then took basically a full day simply to experiment with different arrangements of the bottles and other props.
/Teny Sarkissian
Getting the camera in position was another chore that they overcame through inventiveness. Rather than going through the trouble of finding a cherry picker or building a vantage scaffold, Von Wong collaborated with professional rigger Guillaume Briand to build a system of pulleys to raise the Sony A7r-ii camera into position. Actual capture could be controlled via iPad app, Free Memories, with a 52-inch TV used as a reference display. Due to the roundabout nature of this setup, it took six seconds to actually take each photo.
His model Clara Coutier was fishified from the waist down for the shoot without the need any witchery. The tail was produced out of silicon by Cynthia Brault, a designer who Von Wong’s mother had luckily discovered when preparing for a family wedding. With brilliant makeup and bodypaint applied by Tamsen Rae and Jean-Michel Cholett, the stage was set for some maritime merriment. The results speak for themselves and to the power of cooperation.
Benjamin Von Wong
“Alone, I was just a photographer,” says Von Wong, “but thanks to the help of amazing individuals we transformed a lifeless pile of used garbage into a message: #MermaidsHatePlastic”
You can see more of the shoot on Von Wong’s blog. You can also get involved in the cause for reusable plastics at www. MermaidsHatePlastic. com where prints of the shoot are available for charity
/Benjamin Von Wong
. digitalrev.com2016-12-13 03:00
