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Project Title

The title ‘Object / Fetish’ remained a constant throughout my project. It is a play on the terms ‘objective’ and ‘commodity fetishism’.

Subject

The Roland Barthes essay ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ 1964 and David Campany’s critique of the subject matter provided the basis for my study. Retailers impose commodity fetishism upon consumers in the pursuit of commercial gain by making their products deceptively appealing. I decided to photograph store windows in the retail districts of London to comment upon this issue. The final outcome deviated from my proposal due to the observations that I made as each shoot progressed.

Aims / Objectives / Concept

My initial objective was to reveal the realities of luxury products and the devices that retailers employ to make them appear aspirational. Oxford Street and the surrounding areas became my main location of interest. I had a brief diversion into China Town to photograph products that may be perceived as kitsch to parody luxury items. Given that our brief specified a final edit of five to nine images, I felt that these would be a distraction from the overall theme. Patterns began to form in my photographs due to the conformity of each store unit and the fluorescent presence of their signs. The function of this urban landscape is historically commodity fetishism. I felt it was fitting that the dimensions of the space, such as pavements and central islands in the roads, dictated the composition that I produced. Furthermore, the LED panels in store windows meant that many of my pieces recontextualise and distort the photographs that appear inside them.

Form / Medium / Presentation

My Nikon D750 is a full frame DSLR camera. It has an aspect ratio that resembles 35mm film and I decided to maintain a landscape format throughout the project. I collated in excess of 150 photographs over three evening sessions. The editing software Lightroom was useful to catalogue these images into collections, which automatically record the time each was made. I added a further detail, which was the location of each shoot. A simple blue tag was placed onto any photograph of interest and a collection was made that brought these all together for consideration.

An aperture of f/8.0 was a consistent choice to ensure that most of the detail I captured was sharp and in focus. Since I wanted minimal motion blur, I worked in ISO 3200. Many of the exposure histograms of my photographs were in a well exposed range. The main edits that I made in Lightroom were the addition of +30 contrast and -30 highlights. This was to counter the brightness of signs and panels. Clarity +10 was added with luminance +20, a step added to correct any digital noise that might have been problematic. Patch tool was used a few times to remove distracting reflections in areas of total darkness. Finally, lens correction and the transform modules were useful to align the horizontal and vertical features within each photograph. If any of the horizons or store features were skewed this would have been distracting. My production journal comments on specific colour saturation preferences.

Prior to printing, each image was sharpened in Photoshop with the unsharp mask function. A white border was added because the printer was not able to produce full bleed photographs. As a consequence I feel that the borders actually add to each piece, as the white contrasts the colours on display making them appear bolder. Their lustre finish is also complementary to the fluorescent nature of the works.

Mock up versions of each piece were printed and cut out to allow colleagues to suggest their interpretation of the final edit. Since every image is the same aspect ratio and in landscape it was a challenge to present them as a montage. A single linear formation worked well; however, since they appear all at once compositional choices regarding form, line, colour and subject matter determined their organisation. I would like to propose a book format for the final piece with the photographs appearing in linear chronological order. This would allow the viewer to appreciate each piece without distraction. Interestingly, they actually group in a sequence of three store windows with mannequins, three photographs being photographed and a final three that tie these themes together. With further time and budget the photo book would have many more entries and there would be a possibility to add the time and date as captions.

Research

The works of photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg appealed to me the most during our opening lecture. She was of particular interest to me given that she is a former Westminster graduate student. The main attraction of her take on street photography was her use of colour to imply the intonation of each piece. The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2019 nominee Mark Ruwedel became another reference for his objective study on the effect of historic and political agendas on a physical landscape. There was an implied parallel to my project and photographing a shopping district. Recontextualising a photograph became another theme of my series. Sherrie Levine and twins Doug and Mike Starn have approached this subject in their artwork. Please refer to my production logs for more information.

Working Edit

Final Edit

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The first of several shoots for my project was very experimental. At 8.00pm Wednesday 13th February, I was able to walk around Oxford Street with my proposal in mind. The importance of colour temperature was emphasised in class and I used my past experience as a photographer to document each source of light accurately. Given that I was in an urban setting there was often some patch of grey concrete nearby. Furthermore, I shot in RAW to ensure the highest quality images were achieved and to allow me to edit colours in postproduction. I used apertures around f/8.0 to ensure a deep depth of field. Given the lack of available light I worked in ISO 3200 in order to hand hold my camera. I also wanted fast enough shutter speeds to capture the movement of the crowds with minimal motion blur.

A pattern began to emerge with how I approached each unit. If I was flush against the glass of a store window, my view would be skewed to one side. Given the expertise of visual merchandisers working in such a prestigious area, the images looked flattering and were not in keeping with my brief. I decided to abandon most of the product photographs from this shoot. In order to fit an entire store window in my frame, I had to step backwards. This often involved photographing from the adjacent pavement or from the island in the centre of the road. A consistency in the scale and composition of each image began to become apparent due to these limitations. The photograph of Gap, Piccadilly Circus was one of the most successful from this session. The framing provided a sense of scale with enough detail to make it recognisable. A vertical lamppost and a wheel of a bicycle to the lower left obstructed the window. These elements broke up the untarnished presentation of the products on display. There was even some rubbish scattered on the paving to add subtle disarray. Finally, given that making colour into a statement was a part of our initial brief, I liked how the blue fluorescence of the lighting could be manipulated in postproduction. There was something sinister about the way the light spread to break up the black void surrounding the store unit.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is an annual award exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery. The foundation is a non-profit organisation focused upon the collection and exhibition of contemporary photography. The winner of the £30 000 prize will be announced on Thursday 16th May 2019. Nominee Mark Ruwedel (1954) has spent a career photographing the landscapes of North America, and like myself with this project, his works comment upon the geological, historical and political events that lie dormant within each photograph. He was Associate Professor at Concordia University, Montreal from 1984-2001 and has been Professor of Art at California State University, Long Beach since 2002. The exhibited pieces are from 1995-2012 and merge the subtext of documentary photography with the repetitive nature of conceptual image making. Abandoned railways, nuclear testing sites and empty desert homes appear indiscriminately centred within each composition and were printed with dated darkroom techniques and materials. Ruwedel has commented, ‘I am interested in revealing the narratives contained within the landscape, especially those places where the land reveals itself as being both an agent of change and the field of human endeavour.’ (The Photographers’ Gallery, 2019) (Tate, 2019)

Bibliography

The Photographers’ Gallery (2019). Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2019 Nominee - Mark Ruwedel. The Photographers’ Gallery. Available from www.thephotographersgallery.org.uk/content/db2019-mark-ruwedel [Accessed 13/02/19]

Tate (2019). Mark Ruwedel. Tate. Available from www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mark-ruwedel-13509 [Accessed 13/02/19]

Luke Das, Object / Fetish, 2019