Barry Rosenthal

The artist uses sculpture and photography to express his passion about plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. His project “Found in Nature” is seen around the globe and is featured in National Geographic in the September, 2019 issue. His work is...

The artist uses sculpture and photography to express his passion about plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. His project “Found in Nature” is seen around the globe and is featured in National Geographic in the September, 2019 issue. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Born during the beat generation, the civil rights movement and the cold war, the artist grew up in western Massachusetts. Raised in a variety of settings, urban, suburban and coastal environments, which gave rise to his sense of curiosity. His father’s chemical engineering degree brought the family into the emerging technology of the plastics industry. The artist attended the Stockbridge School, a progressive co-educational, multi-racial boarding school in the Berkshires where he participated in the first Earth Day in 1970. His studies continued at Wilmington College, a Quaker school in Ohio, where he studied sociology and the Dayton Art Institute where he studied photography. He combined his studies into long term projects about rural life both writing about and photographing his subjects. In the summer between college semesters he attended the Apeiron Workshops and studied with prominent photographers Emmet Gowin and George Tice. After finishing college, the artist moved to New York City where he apprenticed himself to several commercial and advertising photographers and learned the business of a studio practice. He opened his own studio and began his career shooting editorial, corporate and advertising assignments and developing his keen lighting techniques. To break away from his commercial work, the artist began two long term self-assignments; Photobotanicus, a study of common plants shot in the field and Found in Nature, large collections of post-consumer plastics found in the world’s oceans.