RETAIL WEST

SARAH KANE
ARTISTS STATEMENT

This is a series that will never end or ever have a point.

It will keep going until I find I haven’t taken anymore images of this nature. Perhaps it won’t continue or end, there probably won’t ever be a point, it might evolve, it might remain exactly the same. With each photo I take of an orderly (or disorderly) supermarket aisle, I will change my opinion of what the photos mean. When I start a series of images there is a beginning, middle and end, with a purpose and goal; to explore, create, print, exhibit and to share. In many respects, this series breaks that mold for me. Basically, this is my toy project. Something I can do whatever I want with and not feel like I have to achieve something with it, because that has never been the point.

This series started when I was seventeen, before I had any discipline or understanding of photography, I shot some images with my fathers vintage Canon SLR and a roll of 200 ISO film. I took the images in an aisle of a supermarket in central Florida. I had no intentions of making it a series, but over the years I found myself in a predicament whereby I was drawn to photograph every desolate aisle in every supermarket from Belfast to Texas. I believe a couple of inspirations played a part in this; the work of Andreas Gursky is an obvious choice – although it must have been subconscious as I didn’t think of it until I reflected on my own work, he obviously had left a strong impression in that respect – and the Danny Boyle film, 29 Days Later. Mix that with the fact that I have a deep love and yet embarrassment with commercial culture and this series was somewhat inevitable. I hate the fact that I do, but I like my images bright, sharp and clean, over-produced and simplified. It’s a trait I picked up when I was polishing off my skills as a freelance photographer, following trends in everything from family photography to model portfolios. So the bright, uniform aisles of supermarkets mirrored the styles I was protruding in my own work.

The vision of this series is as simple as it appears – a banal exploration of retail. Retail is an entity that I have an ever evolving relationship with, which is why I felt the structure of this series was appropriate. There are times when I find a real strength and beauty in shops and shopping that usually goes unnoticed. It can be a social activity, at times a pleasurable one, for anyone to participate in and beneath it being an everyday task without much thought, it’s between each aisle, as we select our purchases that we further shape our personal identities.
In relation to this view, the repetitive colours and shapes in my photographs are trying to make us look harder. Can you pick out a product you buy? Do you view that product as a part of who you are? Is the mass production just a part of life or do you feel is deducting from your identity?

Then there is the negative. A more obvious settlement, especially through the visual aspect and what one might initially feel when looking at the photographs. We find ourselves forced into this world were all of our commodities, luxuries and necessities and neatly packaged and labelled onto shelves and our lives are simplified and commercialised; effectively as TV is said to dumb us down, retail does so in a way that is so blatant and obvious, in our faces with no shame that can we even say a single positive thing about? It is the ugliest form of a world where identity is slipping away before us no matter what we do to preserve it. In a modern world retail is a necessity in order to survive, therefore mass consumerism becomes a part of each of our lives whether we like it or not.
I have not forgotten that this form of retail is not the only one. There are the small shops, the independent stores, family owned and long-running. However, the point I make stems from the reality that in a world where the economy is deflating (and occasionally inflating, depending on when you read this statement), it is the giant superstores that remain at the top of the food chain.

Each image differs from the last, not by a great amount, but it does shift. The angle of the aisle may change, the colour of the packaging is different. The shops change, the cities change, the States, countries and, even, continents change, yet the basic visual remains the same. This all I have set out to capture, simplicity and repetition. What you take from it after that is your own decision and hopefully, despite the lucidity of my ideas and the project as a whole, it says something to you or makes you think for a brief moment about your personal relationship with retail.