Todd R. Forsgren

A Field Guide to Pelagic Plastic Bags 

Plastics polluting the oceans are as ubiquitous as they are destructive. From most every beach and bay to its deepest depths, plastics lurk in a variety of forms: micro-plastics, single-use consumer products, and industrial scale waste. It takes years for them to break down, and at every step along the way they damage marine life, affecting everything from the largest whales to the smallest invertebrates.

The plastic bag is perhaps the most observed, loathed, and photographed of these debris. Stock images of such bags are used to illustrate the countless news articles on this issue that fill our social media streams. Images of a plastic bag floating through a marine environment have become a photographic trope, perhaps because they’re so strangely beautiful as the light refracted off the waves above filters through the translucent forms as their delicate shape is stretched or filled by the currents. They are floating monuments to the single-use consumerism that has led us to the brink of environmental collapse.

Almost every good consumer has a growing collection of these useful items underneath their kitchen sink or in a nearby cupboard. These bags are often printed with a surreal mix of “thank you,” clip art, corporate branding, hazard warnings about the risk of suffocation, and recommendations to reduce, reuse and recycle. Many times, I look at such bags and marvel or cringe as I wonder, “Did someone actually design this?!?"

Thus, I began collecting these objects that we so abhor… at first mining my friend’s cupboards, but soon turning to a global network of contacts: the friends that I have built through years of working abroad. I was surprised how many people seemed to have sentimental connections to their bags, as a point of connection to a specific moment or memory or place; these bags told stories.

In order to present them as the beautiful yet troubling monuments they are, I took the bags swimming in the ocean and photographed them with an underwater camera (don’t worry, I recycled them afterwards). The images reflect on the problematic beauty of these objects as well as the absurdity of attempting to classify and categorize the types of plastic bags that fill the oceans. The source of these monuments becomes clear: we are all implicated in this pollution, we are all guilty.