Gary Emrich
ALL CONSUMED is a series of landscape photographs fabricated with advertising imagery of lush greenery, blue skies and snow-capped mountains from the plastic wrappers on multipacks of bottled water. Addressing how the bottled water industry uses marketing tools to drive Americans to consume 50 billion bottles of water a year at 1000 times the cost of tap water, this project combines a marketing image of nature's purity with plastic waste products to call out the hypocrisy of consumer culture. This bottled water culture is not unique to America however. These landscape photographs are made from packaging from European, Asian and Middle Eastern water companies as well and addresses the impact of branding by the bottled water industry on consumers as we move toward the inevitability of water as a commodity worldwide.
To make these ideas real, I layer a hard, transparent plastic "blister pack" with water bottle packaging on a light table, fill the plastic depressions with bottled water and photograph the composition with a view camera. I have chosen to combine two of the first things we throw away, inverting the value of the things consumers buy by preserving and elevating the disposable and ubiquitous packaging and plastics to make trash an object of desire and beauty.