Output details

Shopping centre interiors: a visual study on spaces of display, desire and consumption

Heron’s research for the ‘Shopping Centre Interiors’ series depicts these spatial archetypes as uninhabited representations of the structures and logics of global capitalism. Using a ‘view camera’ to control perspective, Heron’s analytical composition and systematic construction of these photographs builds on his earlier series from London and the South East (2003–6). These interiors are located throughout England. Their selection followed a sequence of visits and the study of plans, diagrams and photographs focusing on of their symbolic potential to produce a series that blends aesthetic and analytical attention with commercial architectural spaces. These shape the visual connections between their formal, structural and figurative composition.

The images accentuate form and volume, and strip away the distractions of the everyday to reinforce their underlying complexity as spaces of display, desire and consumption. Made in extended series, they locate these architectural archetypes in an historical continuum that extends from Classical Antiquity to Postmodernism, and capture the minutiae of local difference and the convergences of imagined histories and everyday realities.

The references that inform the work examine the depiction of place as a complex mixture of past and present, inspired by JG Ballard’s ‘Kingdom Come’ (2006), a dystopian narrative set around a shopping centre in a motorway town on the M25. Historical visual references include seventeenth century Dutch church interior paintings, the nineteenth century architectural photographs of BB Turner and PH Dellamotte, and contemporary photographers, including Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer who explore the use of compositional archetypes, and David Spero and Nigel Shafran who explore the everyday. Influential theoretical texts for the project include Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’, the constructions of visual meaning examined in Hetherington’s ‘Capitalism’s Eye’ and Crary’s ‘Techniques of the Observer’. Heron’s body of work is also published in ‘Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation’, Ashgate (2013).

SEE DIGITAL PORTFOLIO.