“We buy goods that promise us everything from peace of mind to love itself, yet deliver very little”
Floyd Croll
In the past few months, I’ve become a minimalist and this has had a knock on effect in my street photography, I’ve started to notice consumerism everywhere. Consumerism reminds of the John Carpenter classic movie, They Live. In this film the aliens hide hidden messages everywhere telling the population to Obey, Consume, Sleep etc.
I’ve now made the decision to document this consumerism through my street photography. Walking down a street like Regent Street in London, or even in the small town where I live, I can see the negative effects of consumerism everywhere. I notice people buying things they don’t need or won’t use, and I see how miserable people are while they are doing this. I believe the reason people are unhappy is that most of them know they are spending money they don’t have. It could also be because the shops and streets are so busy that you can’t seem to move or breathe.
I never really understood the unpleasant effects of consumerism until I became a minimalist. Now armed with a camera, I feel a duty to try and document this - why, you might ask? I’ve been finding it upsetting, seeing how as a society we seem to mistreat the people around us, yet we seem to love and become slaves to the stuff we purchase.
We seem to be surrounded by shop windows, letting us know about the ‘70% off sale on RIGHT NOW’ and have you noticed that when you go into that shop, you can never find anything that's actually 70% off? Or is that just me? And there seems to be a new sale starting every week! I bet right now there's a shop where you live that's been closing down for months, if not years.
Walking around cities like Cambridge or London you’ll see people running through each other to get to the next shop, and they don’t seem to care about anyone they bump into, as long as they get to the next shop fast to buy more stuff they don’t need. We treat the staff in the shops like doormats; I know, because I’ve worked in retail and experienced this first-hand.
If you're a regular visitor to my blog, you’ll know that I’m currently working on another project called “Through the window”. It was while I was working on this project that I noticed how people look when inside the shops, so now I’m able to capture these moments for this project. Next time you are out and about in a town or city that isn’t your own, I would like you to look around and think about how similar it looks to your own town. You’ll notice all the same shops, brands etc. Now ask yourself, why did you travel to a different town/city to shop? All the small independent shops are closing and being replaced by brand names like Tesco, Debenhams and the like.
Don’t get me wrong, I used to be one of the flock before I found Minimalism. I used to buy camera gear I didn’t need and once I bought it I never used it. I’ve now gone back to where I started, one camera and one lens, I don’t need anything else for my street photography.
So why do we have this need to consume? I hope to try and understand this with my photographic journey on the streets of our towns and cities.
