Wednesday 21 October 2009

Advertise Here!!!


Travelling on the train to and from work five days a week you are subtly bombarded with adverts and it’s not until you take notice that you realise how ridiculous some of them are. For example, as you enter Southampton central, through the poorer working class areas, you are greated by a large Aston Martin billboard and in the background you have some high rise flats. It’s surely just there to rub our faces in things we cannot afford and are not likely to. Why is Aston Martin advertising to us on a train when surely if we could afford an Aston Martin of our own then we would not be taking the train to work?

This led me on to thinking about advertising and its purpose in society. Do we really take that much notice of it in our daily lives? Is it meant to be a subconscious assault on our minds? Replacing what we want with what we need. I personally believe that advertising and especially high profile product advertising is there to keep us down. If we strive for the unattainable then we are happy, we have a goal which will keep our minds off the real issues in our lives.

I therefore want to look into and find more examples of the misrepresentation of wealth through advertising. To begin I want to go and find the Aston Martin Billboard and photograph that to kick start the project. I then plan on roaming the high streets of the major cities around the area in which I live, Portsmouth and Southampton. I will also be looking for examples of this in the working class areas of these cities. Advertising is less apparent in these areas but I feel confident I will find good examples.

As this briefs time scales is quite short is will be shooting on a digital SLR and to add the most context to the work I will be using a wide angle lens to enable me to include the surroundings around the adverts. I will be shooting during the day so there will be no need for flash and if the weather should turn on me I feel that this will in fact add to the nature of the photographs. I am worried however about the amount of examples I will be able to get. I am hoping for a good verity of advertisements and for the surroundings to be dynamic and interesting to give a good juxtaposition alongside each other.

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