Kathryn Polley - You Don’t Want This

I am primarily a documentary photographer using still life, landscape and portraiture to tell stories of a social nature. I am interested in issues that affect our mental health, in our impact on the environment, in the ways that we seek to belong and how we create identities for ourselves. I am intrigued by the actual act of photographing in and of itself, why we are all so driven to record, what we do with our photographs and what a photograph can say to us.

For more information please visit the website

‘You Don’t Want This’ is a projected exhibition of work made from items that other people threw away because they didn’t want them, found on the beach near my home where I didn’t want them either.

I elected to take a different approach to photographing the rubbish I found after I shocked myself with the appalling realisation that I was bored by looking at yet more photographs of ugly polluted beaches but that if action wasn’t taken soon, there’d be little else left to photograph.

These images were made in April 2015 while I was living in Cardross. All items photographed were subsequently removed from the beach and disposed of responsibly. Which is to say that they are sitting in landfill somewhere because most of it wasn’t recyclable and won’t ever biodegrade.