The experience of browsing in a charity shop, of this charity shop in particular, is a curious one. It is an attic for the community where unused picture frames, video cassettes, exercise bikes, cameras and old clothes are stuffed away. The shop unit is arranged like a sitting room with sofas facing the centre, china dolls on sideboards, picture frames on the walls; it is a shop disguised as a house.
It is furnished with weightless mementoes. By this I mean there is a sense of nostalgia and time-passed but the reader is aware these items have been discarded; the nostalgic reading is undermined and there is no weight of history in the objects.
In arguing the case that photography should be considered as separate from fine-art, John Berger explains that ‘The good photograph is the well-composed one. Yet this is only true in so far as we think of photographic images imitating painted ones.’ While painting’s strength lies in the arrangement of objects within a frame, photography relies on what is excluded from the frame.
The objects in these images have been arranged to create a pleasing composition by the shop staff. This composition is perhaps more so dictated by practicality than aesthetics, but the latter is clearly also a consideration. In photographing these ready made pseudo-domestic compositions what is excluded from the image is, ironically, any genuine sense of an ephemeral history. This creates friction between the objects as they are somewhat forcefully arranged.
It is furnished with weightless mementoes. By this I mean there is a sense of nostalgia and time-passed but the reader is aware these items have been discarded; the nostalgic reading is undermined and there is no weight of history in the objects.
In arguing the case that photography should be considered as separate from fine-art, John Berger explains that ‘The good photograph is the well-composed one. Yet this is only true in so far as we think of photographic images imitating painted ones.’ While painting’s strength lies in the arrangement of objects within a frame, photography relies on what is excluded from the frame.
The objects in these images have been arranged to create a pleasing composition by the shop staff. This composition is perhaps more so dictated by practicality than aesthetics, but the latter is clearly also a consideration. In photographing these ready made pseudo-domestic compositions what is excluded from the image is, ironically, any genuine sense of an ephemeral history. This creates friction between the objects as they are somewhat forcefully arranged.
