Overview

Hawai'i's ""Big Island"" is a place created by fire, being formed entirely from volcanic activity and currently home to four active volcanoes. The Big Island is also, due to its position relative to the North Pacific trash gyre, home to large amounts of plastic debris that the ocean deposits on its shores, particularly on its remote southwestern areas such as Kamilo Beach. Much effort has been made to remove this debris, with a fair amount of success over the years, but the flow of trash onto the beaches continues unabated and makes keeping these beaches clean a never-ending task. And the question arises: Does clearing the beaches of plastic waste, only to bury it elsewhere, actually help? Or does its removal make people less aware of the problem, since out of sight is out of mind? Photographer Michael Kolster became interested in the issue of plastic debris on Kamilo Beach through a paper from the Geological Society of America whose authors claimed that the plastic debris, when melted or otherwise combined with rocks on the beach, would become a horizon marker for the Anthropocene--that is, modern-day fossils that will document present-day humans' presence on Earth millions of years from now. Dubbed ""plastiglomerates"" by geologists, these hybrid ""stones"" are the product of humans burning plastic, whether intentionally or accidentally, that then melts and become fused with the naturally-occurring rocks that were created by volcanoes. These fusions of human and geological activity are likely to persist for thousands of millennia due to their prevalence, location, and composition. They form a record of the presence of present-day humans that will last long after we are gone, far into the unforeseeable future. Wanting to see these plastiglomerates for himself, Kolster traveled to Hawai'i, where he photographed Kamilo Beach and its plastiglomerates. He also collected examples of plastiglomerates that he took back to his home in Maine. Kolster's photographs of the plastiglomerates, both in Hawai'i and collected in his studio, show both the harsh reality and surprising beauty of plastic trash from the beaches of a Pacific paradise. While this trash can be viewed as both an eyesore and an insult to our ideas of what a tropical paradise should be like, Kolster also shows how seeing plastic on the beach is equivalent to looking in the mirror: We need to look closer at our reflection before impulsively wiping it clean, only to have to do it over and over day after day, week after week, endlessly. AUTHOR: Michael Kolster is currently professor of art at Bowdoin College, where he has taught since 2000. In 2013, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography. His work has been exhibited widely and is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums in the U.S and Europe, including the American University of Paris, Brown University, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House of Film and Photography, High Museum of Art, Huntington Library, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, and Williams College Museum of Art. His previous books, all published with George F. Thompson Publishing, are Take Me to the River: Photographs of Atlantic Rivers (2016), L.A. River (2019), and Paris Park Photographs (2022). 126 colour, 17 b/w photos, 4 colour maps, 3 drawings

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9781960521095

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Reviews

""Essayist Russ Rymer states that '[Kolster's] studio portraits of these castaway mongrels strike [him] as equal parts beautiful and unsettling.' Indeed, the whole book has this dichotomous quality. Equal parts information and image, exploration and presentation, data and emotional evocation, Kolster offers an extensive and immersive dive down a plastics-waste rabbit hole we probably didn't want to know existed. But only the person who leads a plastic-free existence can afford ignorance of these 'mongrels of our making.' Kolster's new book is an essential and eloquent exploration of finding ways to see and think about these inadvertent but compelling fusions of plastic and lava.""--Rebecca A. Senf, Chief Curator of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, and author of Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams ""Without dismissing the environmental impact of plastic, Michael Kolster reveals through his evocative photographs a radical mode of perceiving synthetic substances, and by extension all supposedly artificial human objects, as organic parts of nature. His understated, granular images of 'plastiglomerates' (fused masses of plastic debris and lava rock found on a nearly inaccessible beach in Hawaiʻi), some photographed in situ and others individually against white backgrounds, possess an unearthly beauty that both evokes and transcends the vast scale of geological time. Kolster's absorbing commentary adds another layer to a somehow profoundly unsettling book.""--Jeffrey L. Meikle, author of American Plastic: A Cultural History ""Mike Kolster, in Mongrels of Our Making, depicts, among other things, beguiling anthropic rocks (known as plastiglomerates) that are appearing on a remote Hawaiʻian beach. Thought to be produced by beachside campfires, these meldings of marine-borne plastic garbage and chunks of coastal lava will likely mark our presence on the planet long after our uniquely inventive and destructive species has disappeared. Thoroughly exploring the intersection of art, geology, and plastic, the latter made from hydrocarbons, this fascinating and necessary book, with an incisive introduction by Russ Rymer, reflects the quandary of our age: How do we have it all and yet persist?""--Laura McPhee, Professor Emerita at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and author of River of No Return and Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park ""The truth of 'We have met the enemy, and he is us' (Walt Kelly's Pogo poster, Earth Day 1970) is embedded in Hawaiʻian plastiglomerates, denizens of our world's humanature. Such mongrels exist not as mixed-breed dogs but as defiant, accidental amalgams of plastic and lava, to imbue this landscape with wonder and awe, as Mongrels of Our Making cleverly reveals.""--Peter Goin, Foundation Professor, University of Nevada, Reno, and author of Humanature and Nuclear Landscapes

Author Information

Michael Kolster is currently professor of art at Bowdoin College, where he has taught since 2000. In 2013, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography. His work has been exhibited widely and is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums in the U.S and Europe, including the American University of Paris, Brown University, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House of Film and Photography, High Museum of Art, Huntington Library, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, and Williams College Museum of Art. His previous books, all published with George F. Thompson Publishing, are Take Me to the River: Photographs of Atlantic Rivers (2016), L.A. River (2019), and Paris Park Photographs (2022). Russ Rymer has taught creative nonfiction at Harvard University, MIT, Bowdoin College, and Smith College, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Radcliffe Institute. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among numerous other publications, and he is the author of Paris Twilight: A Novel (Houghton Mifflin, 2013), American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory (HarperCollins, 1998) and Genie: A Scientific Tragedy (HarperCollins, 1993), which won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was translated into six languages and transformed into a NOVA television series.

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