Elin Hoyland is a Norwegian photographer based in Oslo, and focuses her work in a documentary/ portraiture format. Many of her recent projects focus on the slow and steady rural lifestyle that is found in many areas of Norway, she captures this through her photojournalist/ photo documentary eye while keeping her gaze fixed on the human aspects of these areas.
About five years ago she travelled to the Maldives to document the growing problem of waste disposal on these tropical islands. Thilafushi which is an island in the Maldives receives hundreds of tonnes of rubbish from the other islands surrounding it each day. Twenty years ago it was an unspilt coral reef, but it is now growing by one square metre every day with rubbish.
She responds to this project in a very photojournalist way, by taking some wide landscape photographs of the area before focusing her lens on the masses of waste there is within the area and the people who's job it is to clear it up.
The Maldives are an archipelago of 1,192 islands in the Indian Ocean, grouped into 26 atolls. Tourism is the country's most important source of income. The country has a population of 270,000. But last year 650,000 tourists visited the islands, but each of them produces
Disposing of plastic water bottles is a big problem on the island which was originally seven kilometres long and 200 metres wide. During its early years, pits were dug. But the volume of rubbish became too great to cover over with sand
The second and third images I have shown out of her series on the island of Thilafushi are my favourite because I think they best show how large the scale of the problem actually is. These images look like alien landscapes and nothing like I have ever seen before, which adds to how ore inspiring they are. I think these two photos have a really nice quality to them because there is high levels of repetition from the colours seen in both and also the objects captured which creates a level of order to the madness of the piles of waste. In the second image she captures a subject in the mist of the waste which gives the viewer a needed reference point to how large-scale the site actual is. The other two images are more of a documentary style compared to the other two which are more like still life, this is needed for her project due to its photo-journalistic nature.
I think her work really captures the viewers attention to the certain waste problem in the Maldives, through the use of well shot images that show how large-scale the problem actually is. Her work provides great inspiration for my project, but I'm not sure how I will capture anything as large-scale as her images, without travelling far away.