‘Supermodernity’, according to French anthropologist Marc Augé, is a concept that birthed the idea of the ‘non-place’, a “space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity”. Airport lounges, supermarkets, hotels, shopping malls, laundromats, are all such examples, spaces that are necessary, but which are often temporally inhabited and seldom the subject of sentiment.
These images explore the effect of modern excesses through vacated shops. The interiors exemplify the temporality of our everyday urban surrounds, ‘non-places’ that in their empty state, are both familiar and yet unfamiliar, and devoid of social exchange. Through photographs, these spaces are repurposed and bear fragments of what was left behind. These fragments, discarded fittings and objects, hint at the very present past and can be peculiarly defined by the words and texts they offer – some instructive (Be Your Own Kind of Beautiful), prohibitive (No Food or Drink to be Consumed in This Store) and informative (Made in Melbourne).
We are living in an age of increasing impermanence within the urban landscape. Places and non-places are constantly on the move, one never fully erased and the other never quite reached. It is perhaps through photography’s ability to represent the past in the present that makes us aware of not only the transience of our surrounds, but of our own temporal existence.
