Fergus Heron shopping centre interiors portfolio 2009-2011

This series of pictures of empty shopping centre interiors throughout England aims to restate display, desire and consumption as features of local spaces. Through solitary views of otherwise populated interiors, the work proposes a paradox of the public and the private, de-familiarising and unsettling the appearance of such spaces, and, more importantly, the process of seeing them. These photographs suggest how the shopping centre interiors of today resemble those of the covered shopping arcades of the nineteenth century, the last great period of globalisation when the rise of modern consumer societies took place, with emergent forms of modern vision. Inspired by early photography of exhibition architecture, the work acknowledges the historical precedents of shopping centres, perhaps enabling them to be seen as spaces where the logic of contemporary global capitalism has visible form.