Looking and thinking about ways consumerism is represented/appears in visual culture, I have been attracted to photographing advertising imagery, signage and particularly images whose purpose is to give a particular look and feel to retail establishments without focusing on particular brands. As I began thinking about how to photograph bread and my first experiments took a forensic, frontal approach, I noticed images on Supermarkets more and more. Invariably, this imagery is designed to suggest quality and entice the consumer – I recognised that my own thoughts about bread were driven by these idealised representations rather than the everyday reality of the shop bought loaf.
Here are a small selection of found bread imagery that I have photographed. Finding some way to contrast these with the bread images I have been taking could be an interesting way forward for the project – reality versus representation, although the way I have chosen to photograph the bread is clearly also not real, merely a contrivance to suggest realism.
