Abstract

Dark Highway: Practice-based photographic explorations of the consequences of aspirational consumerism. This practice-based research investigates how advertising photography strategies, techniques and aesthetics can be employed effectively in environmental and socially engaged issue-based photographic projects. By examining society’s relationship to its primary form of transport, the automobile and road network, this research explores the social and environmental consequences of a consumerist free-market economy. Through new photographic interpretations, the marginalised people, places and creatures that occupy the shadowy zones at the periphery of the road network are given a voice.
The hypothesis underpinning the research is that the photographic aesthetics and techniques of advertising can be used to generate visual interpretations that communicate sometimes difficult and complex messages to the broader public in a language that is accessible. Specific dissemination strategies, adapted from the researcher’s experience of commercial and advertising photography, are utilised to fulfil the further aim of reaching a wide and diverse audience for this issue-based work, as outlined in the accompanying critical commentary. The commentary provides the underpinning research, production and contributions of three major bodies of photographic work that have each been publicly disseminated as exhibitions, Hard Times (2011) Association of Photographers Gold Award 2010, Westway: a portrait of a community (2013) Shortlisted in the World Photography Awards and Sacrifice the Birdsong (2013) shortlisted in the Hasselblad Masters Awards 2015. The practice-based research methodology for each of the projects is multi-layered and in the case of Hard Times and Westway: a portrait of a community, combines elements of advertising photography aesthetics and techniques with social documentary approaches. The latter includes long-term engagement with individuals and hard-to-reach communities as well as openness and collaboration. In the case of Sacrifice the Birdsong, advertising techniques and aesthetics are applied to an issue-based environmental subject and are influenced by still life art history practices. In this way the hybridised approach is tested in two different issue-based fields in order to ascertain its ability to raise awareness and promote public engagement. Advertising photography employs a complex visual language that has developed over the last hundred years and goes hand in hand with a capitalist economy. It can be argued that such consumerist activity is devouring our planet geologically, ecologically and morally. The automobile is the ultimate product of mass-market consumerism and is irrevocably linked to life goals and social status. In the developed world most people own a car before owning a home, but both are milestones in our own personal story. In the UK, the Thatcherite ideology of the 1970s and 80s promoted privatisation and the free-market economy, fuelling the belief that capitalism would benefit everyone, not just the richest. In fact, the opposite has been the case as wealth inequality has drastically increased over the decades. Advertising photography is a tool used to perpetuate consumerism and globalisation. Yet, in the photographic research presented here, it is being used to highlight social and environmental issues resulting from that same capitalist ideology. In effect, the advertising gaze has turned to examine the consequences of its own actions. The three photographic projects presented here make a unique contribution to the field of photography by visually representing the complex links between aspirational consumerism, the automobile, the home and the environment. By examining society's relationship to its primary form of transport, the automobile and road network, the research highlights the consequences of consumerism in 21st century Britain.