Words: Ryan Blackwell

Images: Ryan Blackwell
Image caption: A disposable vape lies inside a loop of dark beads, both dusted in river sediment.

“what happens when photography is used not simply to document material culture but to participate in it. By changing the ontology of these objects—shifting them from product to waste, from waste to portrait—the images question how beauty is constructed, how value is assigned and how material culture shapes our understanding of ourselves.”


Ryan Blackwell

Along the banks of the River Thames, disposable vapes, fragments of packeting, beauty products and intimate items settle amongst the pebbles and silt, becoming absorbed into the landscape. Shaped by water’s meandering flow yet saturated with material traces of human activity the river operates simultaneously as landscape and archive. But the Thames tells two histories at once. Alongside Roman pottery and clay tobacco pipes lies another, unfinished archaeology: a fragmented tapestry of contemporary London woven from the things we no longer notice. The project asks a simple question: is value simply a product of time? Or have we created a material culture so disposable that some objects will never become treasure, no matter how long they survive?


I am not an archaeologist or an anthropologist, but the methods of this project borrow from both. Portraits [2026] developed through collecting, cataloguing, and photographing objects recovered from the river. Photography is more than a means of recording; it is also a method of enquiry. My visual practice and academic research unfolding together, informing each other. Archaeologists reconstruct societies through relationships between people and artefacts. This project asks the reverse question: what do today’s artefacts reveal about people, and are we happy with how the future will understand our present? I was repeatedly drawn to objects that speak clearly about contemporary – single use plastics, medical waste, and objects that come into close contact with the body. Individually they appear insignificant, but together they describe a culture informed by intimacy, convenience and disposability. In many ways, we are our material remains.


 

02.


A Felipo Berio olive oil lid pressed into the mud among pebbles, catching the low afternoon light.

The project began unexpectedly. On a location recce in Greenwich, I noticed a discarded Yves Saint Laurent lipstick half buried in the river bank. Catching the evening light at low tide, it glistened somewhere between treasure and nature. It seemed impossible to separate the manufactured object from the landscape that surrounded it. As a commercial photographer, I construct images of desire around products exactly like this one. And I must have photographed objects destined to share the same fate. Encountering the lipstick in this altered state disrupted that visual language. I was no longer interested in the object as a product, but in its changing ontology. Nothing about the lipstick itself had altered. What had changed was its position within systems of desirability. On a department store counter it signified luxury. Half buried in the Thames it became waste. Through the photograph it became something else again: an artefact. I took its portrait.

05.

Discarded vapes each coated in mud.

The photographs deliberately borrow the visual language I have developed through commercial image-making. Careful lighting, controlled compositions and a tenderness usually reserved for desirable objects are redirected towards things that have been abandoned. Photographed in a visual language reserved for luxury products, I invite the viewer to spend longer with things we would ordinarily ignore. Questioning whether the objects themselves have changed, or simply the way we understand them. This recalls Mary Douglas's (1966) observation that dirt is merely 'matter out of place’ arguing that objects become impure not because of what they are, but because of where they are found. A luxury lipstick on a department store counter signifies desire; but half buried in the Thames it becomes refuse. And so photography interrupts this certainty. The image neither restores the object's original function nor ignores its degradation. Instead, it exposes how meaning is continually negotiated through context. If mudlarking transforms yesterday's waste into today's heritage, photography asks whether that transformation can begin before time has done its work. Photography does not simply record my found objects; it participates in changing them by shifting them into another visual economy — another life and another history.


This became increasingly important as I continued collecting. Every object in Portraits [2026] had been shaped by human touch, first through its manufacture and then through its use. Somewhere along the way value was lost. I call these images Portraits because the objects stand in for the people who touched, carried, desired and discarded them. Their lack of human subjects only intensifies human presence. I found myself imagining the routines they once belonged to: the lipstick applied before work, the disposable vape bought on a night out, the strip of crime scene tape marking an emergency since forgotten. These narratives remain speculative, but they reveal an object’s ability to carry traces of relationships. Looking closely at them became another way of looking at ourselves.

06. 


A Gordon’s gin flask, its label still legible under a skin of algae and silt.

Anthropologists have argued that only artefacts remain from ancient societies, making relationships between people and things essential to understanding the past. Looking at contemporary objects suggests the inverse. What kind of archaeological record are we creating now? The objects collected in Portraits [2026] survive because they were designed to. They are made permanently and used impermanently. Every disposable vape, Actimel carton and fragment of glass embody this contradiction. The surgical glove recovered from the Thames was manufactured for a brief emergency, may outlive my entire bloodline. The plastic itself will surely survive longer than the paper these photographs are printed on. If these objects become the primary evidence of our civilisation, are we comfortable with the story they will tell?

Reading anthropological discussions of material culture changed how I understood the river itself. I had always expected to find waste in the Thames. That expectation felt natural until I realised it was cultural. The river is not inherently polluted; it has been cultivated into this condition through generations of human behaviour. Seeing the first beauty product glistening amongst the silt made it difficult to separate nature from manufacture. Rather than existing as opposites, they had become entangled. As Tim Ingold (2011) suggests, culture is not separate from nature but its continuation. The Thames is therefore neither purely natural nor purely artificial. It is a landscape continually produced through our habits of consumption, where the tide carries evidence of everyday life alongside water and sediment.

In the same way, aesthetics are not separate from anthropology. Ingold argues that aesthetic awareness is not a refined luxury but fundamental to how we relate to the world. Photography became my way of cultivating that awareness. The images are not intended to aestheticise waste, but to use beauty as a means of sustaining attention. Looking is itself is a form of research enquiry and the photograph provides a frame to construct narratives around these objects we would ordinarily dismiss, allowing questions of beauty, significance and responsibility to emerge through sustained attention rather than judgement.

08.

Glazed ceramic shards and a terracotta fragment, worn smooth at the edges.

10.

A blue rubber glove coated in mud, its fingers spread as if mid-gesture.

Mudlarkers have assembled extraordinary archives that illuminate London's past, yet today's discarded objects remain culturally invisible from their work. A Roman jug and an Actimel carton were both manufactured, used and discarded within the ordinary routines of everyday life. The difference lies less in their function than in the historical distance that separates them from us. We romanticise what time has softened. Contemporary waste resists nostalgia because it reflects our own habits too clearly. We are confronted not by ancient history but by ourselves.

Portraits [2026] proposes a shift in perception. It neither condemns nor redeems the objects it photographs, because I remain implicated in the systems that produced them. Instead, the series asks what happens when photography is used not simply to document material culture but to participate in it. By changing the ontology of these objects—shifting them from product to waste, from waste to portrait—the images question how beauty is constructed, how value is assigned and how material culture shapes our understanding of ourselves. If archaeology studies the past through what survives, then perhaps photography can help us excavate the present before it too becomes history. The objects in these photographs are not exceptional. They are ordinary. That is precisely why they deserve our attention.

Writer Bio

Originally from Liverpool and now based in London, Ryan Blackwell is a photographer working across fashion, beauty and art projects. His practice is shaped by a sensitivity to colour and form, exploring ideas of beauty, value and attention. His work combines a graphic, classical sensibility with a contemporary edge, bringing intimacy and character to both people and objects.