I`ve been following Ben since his Mermaids hate Plastic Project. As he was always looking for Volunteers to help build his massive installations it was since then my goal to join on one of his projects as I wanted to learn more about his process and see how he creates his iconic imageries. Whilst I was staying in Bali and he announced the #Plastikophobia Project on his Instagram Channel, it was no thought for me that I had to schedule a week in Singapore and help with the finalization of the build and stick around for the photo shooting days.

Besides helping physically with e.g. cutting and clueing together hundreds of used plastic cups, criticizing the lighting concept (Ben asked me, and as I am, I answered brutaly honest that I don’t think its good – whilst of course explaining what could be done better then eventually really led to changes/ improvements in the final build) and all kind of little jobs. 

I obviously also started taking behind the scenes photos, after the first two days and delivering what I shot during the day every evening right away (sleeping is overrated during projects like that imho anyways) Ben asked me to focus more on this as he always needs decent behind the scenes pictures for the press releases and publications after the projects went life. You can maybe imagine how happy I was to do so!

During his photo shootings in the installation I also got a second trigger for the Broncolor flashs he used to light up the scenery, which helped that these pictures got even better, as I had a similar light look to his final images. After the press release it was quite an honor to see that some of my images got shared across several platforms, magazines and posts about the project.