Cardiff: Where consumerism meets the traditional culture…

UK: The place of deep truths at unexpected places...

Even though I tend to dislike explaining the meaning of my photos for visitors of my site, because I believe that the photographer is only the medium and that each viewer should extract the message the way they feel, this time I will make an exception for once.

The reason is to it is very prosaic. After editing some of the stuff that I took during the last week when walking around the centre of Cardiff and Cardiff Bay, I started to see some broader connotations of my work and its connection to the state of society and cultural values in today’s world.

Usually when shooting, I know exactly what the story is and what I’m trying to say through my photos, but this time I used a different mechanism that is a bit more intuitive. I was just shooting everything that I felt was worth capturing and waited for the story to come out itself later in the process.

As a media studies major, I have very close to cultural studies and semiology, and as a starting photographer I naturally tend to position myself as an observer. With a strong passion for people watching and trying to tell their life stories through the way of their acting, I love putting things in a broader context and see what story could images say about them…

Here’s one of the essays that I shot in front of one of the shopping centres downtown Cardiff. I attempted to incorporate the nearby standing statue representing the traditional family in the pictures and so try to find out what the liaison between consumerism, modern architecture, and urban style of life vs. traditional family values would be.

Trying to propose more of a reflexive thought about the relation between today’s model of traditional family in the UK and the life heavily driven by consumerism, this photo essay is aiming more on independent thinking process of each of the viewers.

If you have some interesting input, and would like to say how you feel about this issue, or would just like to send a feedback, please do so in the comments section. Feedback is always welcome as it enables people to compare their own thoughts and the way they personally see things with perception of others, which can sometimes be very enriching!