M-100
(2024-ct)

On December 15, 2024, two tankers with heating oil of the M-100 brand crashed in the Black Sea. More than three thousand tons of heavy oil products fell into the water area from the broken ship hulls. Being a product of oil refining, due to its density, the fuel does not float to the surface, but remains in the water column and will be released on the shores of the Krasnodar Territory and the Republic of Crimea for a long time, causing damage to birds and marine fauna. Proven and working technologies for removing fuel oil from the water column do not yet exist, so the main method of cleaning is to collect the discarded mass from the shoreline manually by volunteers.

A week after the incident on the coast, more than four thousand volunteers participated in the elimination of the spill, washing and rehabilitation of birds. Many of them arrived at the emergency site from other regions of Russia. Despite the difficulties in organization, the lack of clear algorithms and the threat of poisoning with fuel oil vapors, people managed to clean up a significant part of the coastline.

Having visited the affected Black Sea coast twice as a volunteer, I photographed the work of volunteers and their results, made a series of portraits of them, and also brought some materials that interacted with fuel oil from the coast and later took pictures on an electron microscope, namely: sand, sea water, algae and fluff of affected birds.