This pic was taken by dapd in april 2010. There was the Deepwater-Horizon-Desasters in the Golf of Mexico, an oil rig exploded and about 780 million liters of oil streamt into the Golf of Mexico. It was a big oil spill where many animals and plants died. The pollution was giant, you can see the consequences till today.
On the photo is a sea bird with glued wings which sits on an oil boom. It's full of oil, from tip to toe, now the colour of the bird's feathering is as black as the surface of the water. I was shocked when I saw that photograph the first time, it's horrible! At first, I especially thought to the animals which died because of oil into their lungs or in their feathering and then I thougt to the effects for the environment. On the first sight you think it's a nice pic because it's coloured and colourful, but in the next second the picture is horrible, a bird without real wings and a black water. Maybe the bird was white before the oil spill, you can see it in a few areas of his body.
The poor sea bird in the middle seams to be very thin because his whole body is glued with oil. The bird is nearly completed black and it looks like it tries to fly but it is impossible with such glued wings. It is sitting on an red, yellow and white-brown oil spill, the spill is the only colourful thing on this picture. Around the bird is nothing, only a "dead" water, a black, polluted water with nearly no more life in it. The bird seams to be alone on an oil boom in a bleak unending oil film.
The picture is terrible, all around the world you can see pictures like this but anyway I think the most of the people don't really think about what they see on these pictures, all of them say: "Oh, it's so awful, how can something like this happen? What an environmental desaster!". Of course they all know what they see and the most of them also know how it happened, but they don't figure the effects and what it means if the birds have glued wings and many marine animals oil into their lungs. The most of the people look away.
I think pictures of dying animals or humans touch people more than pictures of exploding oil rigs or oil films. Perhaps some people feel sorry for the bird and want to support helping campaigns because they recognize the bad situation. Pictures like the one above are important because if there are only reports about the missing oil and the costs of the damage, I think many people don't want to help.
Maybe the photograph photographed the bird with aim in such a big contrast of the colours to the boom. Maybe it should show that people are happy while others have to die because of them, it shows the contrast between the world of the persons concerned (here the animals: the black glued bird in the middle of an unending bleak oil film on the water) and the humans world (the colourful oil boom in the middle of the horrible desaster).
The message of that picture could be that we have to care better for our holy world and the whole life on it, the animals and plants are as important as we are. It shows the consequences of the humans egoistic handling with all kind of materials. It shows that the people can't get enough, they always want to have more and better technologies and that's one result of it. The most sad thing of all is that we have headlines of such desasters, reports and news on TV but after a few weeks no one talks about it, all seams to be forgotten like it never happened, but it's still there. Desasters like this can't disappear from one year to the next. And the humans don't change something, they always continue their work on another place.
