Inspired by his father’s obsession with adding new shelves to walls, photographer and furniture design student Darragh Casey decided to shoot some family portraits that featured family members themselves shelved alongside some of their prized possessions. His project spans three generations of his family and is titled “Shelving the Body”.
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By and large, as a professional of whatever description, clients hire you based on experience and expertise, grace under pressure, problem-solving skills, and your finely-tuned ability to transcend the limitations of the assignment and distill the essence of an idea into its most purely realized form.
Okay so that’s what they tell you in college, but honestly it’s mostly just blather. Assignment photography is a hot-dog factory where the end results are images rather than sausages. If people saw what went into some of this stuff there’s no way they’d want anything to do with it. The sad reality is that there are all kinds of reasons you’re brought in on projects, some of them more edifying than others. Sometimes you’re exactly the right person for the job, other times you’re just a camera monkey. My favourite is the “wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if” call, where everyone gets all excited about an idea that turns out to be completely impractical. Well, this is the story of one of those ideas that actually managed to see the light of day.
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Wal-Mart stores have so many items that occasionally an outdated one will remain on the shelves for years after they’re no longer relevant. Case in point: the Sony MVC-FD200 Mavica digital camera. The one above was recently found at a Wal-Mart in Illinois. The camera first hit the shelf back in 2002 and has remained there ever since. It featured a state-of-the-art 2-megapixel sensor and allowed photographers the convenience of storing digital photos on 1.44 MB floppy disks (remember those?). If you think Wal-Mart’s trying to rip you off, consider this: the lowest price for this camera on Amazon is nearly $1000.
(via The Consumerist via Gizmodo)
Choices is a Warhol-esque (or Gursky-esque) project by photographer Richard Stultz, who visited various stores to document the mind-numbingly large number of choices consumers are faced while shopping. He states,
When we shop, we are presented with aisles of thousands of different products. There are shelves with an endless variety of similar items, often just a variation on the ones next to them. Other shelves display large quantities of identical products. We may find 50 types of beer, hundreds of jars of bleach, or graphic displays of soap. There are cans of dog food with descriptions that sound as appetizing as anything we might cook for ourselves. There are so many shades of hair coloring that we can’t distinguish between many of them.
Beyond the astounding quantity and selection, retail displays are often visually interesting with striking design elements, color, and repetitive patterns. But as we shop and try to find the perfect product, we often don’t see the perverse beauty of these choices.
At Levi’s Photo Workshop in New York City last year there was a large collection of cameras sitting on shelves and available for anyone to use. To keep track of what was missing, labels and outlines were drawn on the wall to “carve out” little homes for the cameras. If you have a sizable camera collection, labeling your walls could be a neat way to both organize them and show them off!
Image credit: Cameras for Public Use at Levis Workshop by Shawn Hoke Photography
