'Shopping Centre Interiors' works included in group exhibitions 'Brighton Photo Fringe' at Phoenix Brighton, 2013, 'CAPITAL', George and Jorgen, London, 2012, 'Elusive', Camberwell Space, London, 2011. Published in 'Emerging Landscapes', edited by Deriu, Kamvasinou and Shinkle, Ashgate, 2014
This work aims to address how photography might depict everyday commercial spaces where globally produced goods are displayed, desired and consumed. Shopping Centre Interiors is an ongoing project consisting of pictures that enable reconsideration of some of the spaces of the city centre, the town and their peripheries as interiors ordered according to commercial interests and consumer desires. These spaces are those in which the photographic image itself is often central.
The pictures involve a methodological approach in constructing comparative views of the interior of shopping centres located throughout England. Subjects are selected which visually reference combinations of architecture from classical antiquity to the post-modern. View camera technology is used to make highly structured single pictures, or where possible, pairs of photographs that share consistent picture construction. The method of photographing types of spaces often perceived as similar in different locations complicates photography as a means of making place knowable and poses questions about the relationship of photography to historical and architectural reference.
The pictures also propose a contemporary visual commentary upon some of Walter Benjamin’s observations in The Arcades Project. Benjamin considered the nineteenth century Parisian arcades as a material replication of the unconscious, a repository of ‘commodity fetishism, reification, the world as inwardness’. These photographs of the modern shopping centre might enable some connections between everyday realities and historical continuities to be made newly visible.
Dissemination includes group exhibitions 'Brighton Photo Fringe' at Phoenix Brighton, 2013; 'CAPITAL', George and Jorgen, London, 2012; 'Elusive', Camberwell Space, London, 2011. Images from the series with an accompanying essay are published in 'Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation', edited by Davide Deriu, Krystallia Kamvasinou and Eugenie Shinkle, Ashgate, 2014.