What's it all about, eh?

Before we started doing this week-long project, I’d never really considered the way advertising and brand promotion made up such a heavy part of our everyday experience. Of course, I’ve thought about and discussed the ethics and practices of companies that advertise their products on a relentless basis (mainly as a critique of capitalism, yawn…)

But taking these pictures has been a genuinely astonishing eye-opener for me. I spent the first 18 years of my life in a pretty naturally colourful landscape – I’m not going to act like I lived in the woods or something like that, I spent the majority of my time in urban areas, but London is definitely something different. Guy Debord defines the everyday as anything that is unspecialised, and I personally cannot think of anything more unspecialised that subconscious consumerism in the sense that every single product and service is vying for your admittedly divided attention. In a city, it is almost terrifying just how uniform everything else, how grey, white and off-white gives a sense of unimportance and how advertising is what throws colour into buildings.

What was most startling for me, really, was how the majority of colour on the streets was that of shop signs. If I think about New Cross Road, I think of harsh light and vibrant differences in colour, but absolutely none of it is natural or not trying to sell me something – everything is competing for my attention and to try and get me to remember it for the future.

It’s pretty weird, I reckon.