Think different with macro

Photographic artist Jennifer McKinnon spends much of the year searching the streets in and around Atlanta for dumpsters. These unsightly waste containers can be found lurking behind shopping malls, sitting on construction sites and blocking people’s driveways. At first, she was attracted to them due to their unusual (and aesthetically pleasing) markings – a result of natural and unnatural weathering – but over time she came to realise that her images could be used to highlight the impact that waste and consumption has on the natural world. Her early ‘dumpster abstracts’ have instant graphic appeal: bands of colour sweep across the frame giving them the air of contemporary paintings. But in recent months she has been focusing more on digital composites – layering multiple abstracts in one image. ‘Think collage, but created using Photoshop,’ she explains.

For the series Uncontained Consumption, for example, Jennifer layered ‘bits and pieces’ of dumpster walls to create composites that resemble