RATIONALE - Consumerism

RATIONALE:

Consumerism

SPAM, 2014.

Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the excessive acquisition of goods and services. In the UK, consumerism drives capitalism, relying on private companies and corporations convincing us we want and need products that we don’t actually need at all. In the 21^st century, we are obsessed with consuming which has no doubt evolved from the expanding dominance of media culture and mobile technologies. In common, everyday life it is unlikely that we will go a day without finding ourselves bombarded by the enticing imagery, bold typography and bright colour of advertisement. The use of celebrity endorsement, ‘weasel words’ and humour all contribute to the manipulative approaches of advertisement, encouraging us to relate through their promotion of false, short term ‘needs’. It has almost become more about how well a product is marketed than the actual quality of the product itself that determines its success.

Recently I have become interested in the expansion of online advertisement. On a daily basis I find myself bombarded with poorly designed, tacky advertisements and junk email presenting imperative statements telling me how I’m ‘entitled to compensation for my recent accident’ or how I can ‘claim a free iPhone’. The persistency of these distracting and empty claims is almost mesmerizing, underlining the manipulative methods associated with 21^st century advertisement. 

Initially I was considering the idea of using found imagery in my response, montaging a collection of moving advertisements or ‘GIFs’ found online. However I felt it was an image-making process that would be the more appropriate method.

The shifts in online advertisements have brought the need for new words or semantic changes to the meaning of a word. For example, ‘SPAM’ once completely associated with the brand name of a tinned ham product is now more commonly used to define ‘irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the internet to large numbers of users’. I find irony in the comparison of these two definitions of the word – the idea of a cheap, processed product often described as ‘mystery meat’ almost echoes the cheapness of the ‘SPAM’ advertisements.

It seemed appropriate to take this comparison forward into the image making process by combining an image of tinned SPAM with the techniques applied to the online SPAM. Whilst wanting to comment on the prevalence of online advertisement I also wanted to ensure that I was producing a response of visual interest.

In my final response, I shot a still life image of a SPAM tin depicted almost as a commercial product image. The spam is positioned in the center of the frame on a bold coloured red backdrop helping to emphasise attention on the tin. By using direct flash I was able to create quite a flat image with the rich tone of the red backdrop appearing more saturated. This method also created glare from the tin highlighting its shiny, greasy textures. These technical choices were based on the idea of creating an almost distasteful and uninviting aesthetic to the product, perhaps the opposite of the clean, polished aesthetics of advertisement. I suppose essentially I was aiming to implicate an amateur aesthetic, presenting a more realistic, untouched, unedited image, going against the conventions of commercial advertisement and traditional photography in order to draw a comparison to the amateur characteristics of online advertisement. To further illustrate this I made the image into an animated .GIF, with the image continuously bouncing and flashing a variety of colour hues in an almost strobe like manner, an appropriate method intended for online and mobile use.