“I’ve found it’s a lot more fun to go into stores and malls and take photos than it is to go buy something. In fact, all the pretty colors and displays, carefully crafted to make you want to buy things you don’t need, work almost as well in photos as they do in real life, but there’s less danger that you will run up your credit card debt.” – Lisa Brockmeier
Lisa Brockmeier at A Complete Bunch of Pants has gone shopping, so you don’t have to. And she brought along her camera. The result is a disturbing study of excess and a look at the true face of shopping.
In each photo, bright colours burst from over-stuffed aisles shouting “happiness”, but the subjects in the photos look anything but happy. Portly, pasty-legged shoppers cross a depressing parking lot heading to Circuit City’s large glass doors, like church-goers ready to absolve their sins. Tired and hungry dads pull on equally tired and hungry children as they wait in a McDonald’s line-up, ready to assert their freedom of choice, by picking which toy they’ll get with their Happy Meal. They are all great shots, each capturing the sad blandness of the consumer existence today.
The photos remind me of the famous “99 Cents” shot that appeared in Harper’s and other magazines last year, but there is something more honest about Brockmeir’s images. Some are blurry, many aren’t framed well, but that is all for good reason. The photos were part of a covert operation, to avoid the mall’s security guards. Unauthorised photography is not allowed in many stores and malls, so these images were grabbed quickly and quietly and, for me, it adds to their power.
Corporate espionage is often the reason for banning photography in stores, but I think there is something much more sinister at work here. We all shop, it’s necessary and sometimes enjoyable. But shopping has become more than a necessity. It’s now a national past-time and a reason for being. Shopping, we are told, will save us from depression, unhappiness, loneliness and terrorism. But taking unrehearsed snapshots of people doing this fantastic act is forbidden because it reveals how empty the act of shopping is.
Removing these images from their context, like Brockmeier has done, and viewing them in the comfort of your own home, without the flourescent lights and muzak numbing your brain, lets you pull back from the shopping experience and see this national obsession in a new light. Through these images, big box stores become Skinner boxes lined with bright colours, reassuring faces all telling us that we’re free, we’re happy and we can have our pick from the endless racks packed with stuff we don’t really need.
Next time I go shopping, I’m taking a note out of Brockmeier’s book. I’m leaving the credit card at home and bringing my camera instead.
