Ray’s Blog

The morning after Barack Obama claimed the presidency of the United States, at 10a.m., I went to the local Borders to find a copy of that day’s New York Times. Unfortunately, I could not find a New York Times or a Washington Post or any daily newspaper. They were all sold out. A stranger drove up to me and told me that he had driven around to all the local stores and that they were all sold out too.

A few days later I bought a commemorative copy of the Washington Post at the local Shoppers Warehouse for a $1.50. Recently, the Washington Post was selling their commemorative copy of the November 5 issue online for $9.95. You can also bid on copies of different national newspapers on eBay. The day after the election there were rumors of copies of the New York Times selling for $250 online.

As the decline of the newspaper industry worsens, the rush for the Obama Election Newspaper points the importance of print medium. People wanted a memento to remember this historical day and to show others in the future that they were around when it happened.

The world of professional photojournalism is very small and extremely competitive. Most photojournalist continuously look for new ways to give themselves an advantage over their competition. The psychological pressure to keep up with other photographers is intense. This reminds me of Juliet B. Schor’s argument on the psychology of competitive spending in her book “The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need.” Photography is a very competitive field and there is a lot of pressure to keep up with the latest equipment and technological advancements.

My obsession with Apple computers began after I defined myself as a photographer. The Mac is the unofficial computer of photojournalism. I see them in use in the darkroom at Redskins games and I see them in use during portfolio reviews at photojournalism conferences. When I first started in this business, Macs seemed like a tool you had to use if you were to consider yourself a photojournalist.

In our culture, being a Mac person or PC person has become one of the many ways we define ourselves. In pop culture Mac people are presented as being more creative, while PC people are presented as just being average. Apple’s current advertising campaign tries to play on these stereotypes. The commercials feature a PC guy, who is an overweight corporate type and the Mac guy, who is younger and represents more independent-minded people. The contrast is striking and I believe an important part of Apple’s allure.

Early in my photographic education, I began to link Mac Computers with being a ‘real’ photographer and this idea stayed with me for a long time. My Mac obsession began when I started classes at a media arts school in Chicago. This school had devoted an entire floor to a digital photography lab. The majority of the computers in the lab were Apples. During this time the major camera companies had just introduced the first models of semi-professional models of digital SLR cameras.

The photojournalism students were one of the first to embrace the technology and apply it to class work. Soon they were showing off their new cameras in classrooms. Making the “switch” was an important move in the development of young photojournalist at this time. It was expensive and it also required buying a computer to process the images. My obsession with Apple was solidified in these classes, as I watched my classmates show their work on new iBooks.

This week we discussed the influence of consumerism on the formation the American identity structure. We discussed Bourdieu’s theory that says that  “consumption patterns and taste are stratified by socioeconomic categories such as class, education, and occupation.” We discussed how the pattern of “see, want, borrow and buy” has fueled an increase in American consumption, and we learned the shocking fact that the more education we receive the more stuff we are likely to buy. We also talked about the pressure that parents feel to “keep-up” for their children. We learned about people that have voluntary and non-voluntary dropout of the consumer cycle by “downshifting” their spending habits.

Schor also gives nine principles to help Americans change their consuming lifestyles. She suggest that we need to control desire, we should not focus on exclusivity, and we should voluntary restrain competitive consumption. She also said we need to learn to share, we need to become better-educated consumers, and we should avoid shopping as therapy. Finally, she suggests we need to decommercialize our rituals, we need to work less so we can break from this convenience-oriented lifestyle, and we need to base our tax code on consumption.

At 2 p.m. on a cool and overcast day, the parking lot of Wal-Mart Supercenter at Central Park shopping center in Fredericksburg was busy with cars looking for the spots closes to the store’s entrance. A warm breeze blows on shoppers’ faces as they enter through the automatic doors of the store. Walking into this Super Wal-Mart was a little disorienting, because of the large number of people entering and exiting the store at the same time. It takes a few seconds to weave through the mass of people and shopping carts. Once you make your way towards the isle of products, you begin to hear indistinguishable music from the store’s P.A. system. The true American shopping experience has begun.

Wal-Mart has an enormous variety of products. This Wal-Mart has a full grocery section, as well as all the regular products that Wal-Marts normally carry. The store also featured a McDonald’s, a bank, optometrist, and a portrait photography studio. The grocery section of the store seemed to have the most density of people. The store was designed to fulfill almost every basic domestic need. It would be hard to think of a basic product, needed in everyday life, that Wal-Mart did not sale. They have toys, home supplies, groceries, car-care, pharmacy, electronics, sporting goods, books and movies, and clothing. The majority of shoppers at Wal-Mart were actually purchasing products and leaving with bags in their hands.

The demographic make up of Fredericksburg area is reflected along the isle of Wal-Mart supercenter. Wal-Mart shoppers are a very diverse group of people. The age range of shoppers varied from young to old. The majority of shoppers in Wal-Mart were individual women shopping by themselves. There were all types of couples shopping together. For instance, there were couple with and without children; there were individual women with children. There were also a few males shopping by themselves. The men, if they had a shopping cart, tend to have less in their carts, compared to the women.

Wal-Mart employees were mostly women, young adults, minorities, and senior citizens. The gender make-up of the cashier reflected the pattern through out the store. Out of 21 cashiers only 3 were male. There was also a notable absence of white males age 25 to 50 working in the store.

The only abnormal thing about shopping in Wal-Mart is that it feels so normal. Wal-Mart has become a part of everyday lives for a lot of people. For younger generations, shopping in this type of store feels very natural. If there were no Wal-Marts or Targets, where would we shop for everyday supplies?

I love to hate Wal-Mart, but I still shop there. I try only to go to the store when I absolutely have to. When I do visit Wal-Mart, I try to limit the time spent in the store. I do not window shop there; I usually go straight for whatever item I need to buy. I purchase all of my school supplies, birthday cards, personal hygiene items and medicines from Wal-Mart.

Adam Rome’s book “The Bulldozer in the Countryside,” describes America’s economic system as an “economy of unpaid cost.” This idea was very enlightening and helps us understand how our society functions. America’s society functions to serve the interests of business.  Social institutions within our society are supposed to benefit the community, but in reality they are aimed at satisfying the business class. For example, the public education system, financed by taxpayer’s money, trains people to enter the largely private work force. The cost of educating and training workers is passed on to the community. The public bares the financial burden of educating workers for private gain.

Rome argues in his book that “unless restrained by legal action, by organized opposition, or by government regulation” for-profit businesses do not have a strong reason to protect the public health, public lands or natural resources. Unless protecting public interest adds to profit margin of businesses, for-profit companies need to be regulated to ensure that their actions does not damage the public good. If businesses are not restrained by legal boundaries they will attempt to pass the private cost of production, whether environmental or social, onto individual taxpayers.

Another part of this week’s discussions and readings that caught my attention was the idea that nature is a valuable consumer commodity. This idea of nature as a commodity helped spark the creation of the conservation and environmental movements.  Concerns about the aesthetic and use value of the land seem to be on an equal level with larger ecological matters. Saving land for recreational should not be more important than saving land to ensure a functional and healthy environment.

The development of a new “land ethic” was important because it marked an intellectual and philosophical change in the way Americans viewed land. They started to understand that land was a finite resource and that the effects of how land was used spread beyond imaginary property lines. During this period, the idea of the public good becomes an important factor in how land is used. Some groups did challenge these new ideas about land use. Organizations like the National Home Builders Association challenged these notions, on the bases of maintaining free enterprise.

This week we also discussed how groups organized to protect wetlands, hillsides, and floodplains against home development. We learned about Ian McHarg’s efforts to promote “Design with Nature,” a new way of planning developments that consider the environmental impact when creating new home sites. We explored how housing development helps increase soil erosion; increase flooding from water runoff, and harm to wildlife living in urban and suburban areas. We also discussed the development of land use regulation on the nation and state level, and Nixon’s involvement in the passage of National Environment Policy Act, which marked the federal government’s commitment to environmental issues.

Dispatches is a quarterly magazine for people who love writing and long-form photo essays. Through the eyes of photographers who specialize in “capturing human reality”, and the words of experienced writers who have firsthand knowledge of the story that they are reporting on, the magazine examines important global issues in their broadest context.

The magazine’s major goal is to provide information that allows individuals to critically examine the global problems that plague humanity. “In an imperiled world that can barely keep up with itself, more people must understand and debate the world around them in order to solve critical global issues.”

Dispatches was launched in 2008 and the first issue focusd on America. The issue featured articles for Pulitzer Prize winning author Samantha Power, Paul Theroux, Muzamil Jaleel, and photographer Antonin Kratochvil.

The magazine is not available at most local newsstands and a subscriptions can be purchased at the dispatches website for $68. You can also purchase single issues for $17. Dispatches was designed by de.Mo, in a book-sized format.

Dispatches would be of interest to anyone who enjoyed non-fiction writing and documentary photography. There are no advertisements in the magazine and all 200 pages of the first issue were devoted to words and photographs.

The vision of the American Dream would be incomplete without a home surrounded with a white picket fence. Home ownership is one of major goals that most Americans strive for and it is the most expensive item we will ever purchase. For many Americans, the home represents the majority of their wealth. We can look at our current economic problems to see how important homes are to the health of the American economy. The decline in the value of American’s homes has resulted in a parallel decrease in the health of our economic system.

In the book “The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism,” by Adam Rome, we learned how the introduction of consumer economic theories fueled the mass production of housing developments similar to Levittown.  These theories are based on the idea that the more money we spend the healthier our economy will be. The home became an important stimulus for our economy. We spend large amounts of money on our homes, from everything from repairs to the utilities we use. The increase in consumer spending led to an economic boom, but it also came with an environmental cost.

It is frustrating to learn that many of the environmental problems we face today could have been addressed 60 years ago. Today, the idea of solar house seems like a new invention. Solar homes are constructed with basements, more windows, roofs that are painted white, breezeways, and are positioned to harvest the sun’s energy to heat the home. Today we rely on air conditioning, electric heat or gas heat to regulate the temperature of our homes.  This week we learned that the United States has had access to solar technology since the 1940’s, and that our government along with the home industry completely ignored solar in order to save money.

Today’s environmental problems are the result of policy decisions made in the 1940s. It was possible for our government to lessen the impact of higher energy cost on future generations by creating polices that enforced responsible planning and home building. Instead, they have passed the economic and environmental cost on to future generations.

In class we also talked about William Whyte’s efforts to help preserve open spaces from development. He proposed that new housing developments should be constructed in small clusters, in an effort to save more open space around these communities. Unfortunately, his plan placed too much faith in the housing industry to regulated its self. These companies did not act in the interests of the public good.

This week in our discussions, we talked about the origins of the conservation and environmentalism movements. We discussed how the construction of Levittown represented a fundamental change in the home building industry. We learned how Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt created government agencies to assist the home building industry’s mass production efforts. We also discussed the environmental impact of septic tanks. Finally, we examined the conflict between the environmental and the property rights movements.

I started high school in 1991 at the height of the popularity of grunge rock. Around this time, I left the jockey phase of my teens and drifted into a more rebellious phase. My rebelliousness was expressed in my clothes. I had recently discovered Nirvana’s “Smell Like Teen Spirit,” and my fashion sense had started to reflect the change. I remember buying a pair of Converse All-Stars that had a plaid pattern. I wore baggy jeans and baggy shirts. I started to shave my head and I wore a black leather necklace with a peace symbol dangling at the end. I was trying to figure out how to be my own person and at the same time fighting with the need to fit in with my peers. In hindsight, I realized that these goals were contradictory to each other.

The film “The Merchants of Cool” and Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “Coolhunt” has helped me see that what I thought was my youthful rebelliousness phase was not so subversive as I may have thought. The film helped me see how advertising companies influenced and helped create the “mid-drift” and the “mook” teenager archetypes. The film talked about how the mid-drift formula has been sold as a new form of female empowerment and how Britney Spears’s public sexual awakening became a model for pre-teen girls about what it means to be a woman.

The “feedback loop,” where teenagers reenact what they have learned as normal behavior from the media is another important topic that the film explored. For adults, watching teenagers act out what they have learned form popular culture is disturbing. Recently, I experienced the feedback loop at a high school competition cheerleading meet. While the group of cheerleaders waited for the results of the meet, they all danced together in the middle of the gym. Some of the girls were dancing in a very sexual suggestive way, as parents and other supporters watched.

In the Gladwell’s essay, he explores the process that companies use to discover what is cool. Marketing companies have discovered that the problem with uncovering the next trend is that coolness is elusive.  Cool is only cool if it stays underground. The nature of cool is that it does not want to be discovered.  Cool hunters force the trendsetters to continuously adapt to stay ahead of the wave of corporate copycats. Corporations profit from the cycle that they created. First, they discover what is cool so they can reproduce it on a massive scale, which removes the unique individual quality that made it cool in the first place. Finally, they have return to the streets to find the next cool trend.

Last week in our class discussions, we discussed diffusion research and how fashions trends spread from one place to another. We also learned about Sprite’s anti-marketing, marketing campaign, and that one of the keys of cool hunting is to look for cool people first and the trends they create second.

One of my last purchases was a Domke F-5XA camera bag. The bag is very small and it can carry a couple of lenses and one camera body. My favorite thing about this bag is that it limits how much I can carry. Camera equipment is heavy and after a few hours of walking around with one bag hanging on my shoulders, it starts to hurt.

The water-resistant bag weights 1 pound. Its dimensions are 8.0 x 4.5 x 8.0 and it comes with a non-slip gripper shoulder strap. The bag can also be used as a waist pack, if you purchase the optional waist belt. The internal compartment can be divided into as many as three separate compartments. The bag comes in three colors, olive, sand, and black. The bag is designed for cameras, lenses, cell phone, MP3 player and accessories. The bag costs $50 and can be purchased online at B and H Photo and Video.

This bag is cool because it doesn’t look like a typical camera bag. If you own more than one piece of photography equipment, you can keep it hidden when you travel until you need to use it. Last weekend, I used it on assignment at the Gold Cup horse race in Fauquier County, and I hardly know I had it on my shoulder. I had loaded the bag with four lenses and memory cards.

The world of fantasy created by movies, television shows, books and toys are an important part of what draws Americans to consume these types of products. The essay, “The Act of Reading the Romance: Escape and Instruction,” by Janice A. Radway, examines how American women who have been removed from the work force and confined to the domestic space of the home, have sought to mentally escape the tedium of their lives through the romance novel.

The idea that consuming certain products as an act of subversion is problematic. Radway’s interviewees’ thoughts on the benefits on romance novels reminds me of Fiske’s argument about the use of mall public spaces to subvert the dominant patriarchal culture that controls them. This is a problem because the romance novels are created by the dominating power structure. Any attempt to sabotage it is laughable, because the power that is gained from the act is not real power.

The romance novel seems to be just another pop culture product designed to reinforce the roles that women play in our society. The books repeat the same basic themes, where a passive heroine goes on an adventure with a dominant male character. One of the things that interested me was the use of pseudo rape scenario in many of the romance books. The heroines have to frame their sexuality in the confines of America’s patriarchal dominant culture. In these books men are casted as sexual aggressors and are made to almost force themselves selves on the women. Aggressive male sexuality is used as a way to protect womanhood, because a woman who wants sex is somehow seen as loose or slutty.

During our class discussions on this essay we also talked about how the romance novel fights against the idea that all women are naturally inclined to be good mothers, how readers have idolized the authors of romance novels and how the novels help readers escape from today’s social and political problems.

The essay, “Toy Theory: Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference,” by Ann DuCille, examines how Mattel’s efforts to create multi-cultural Barbie’s helps reinforce racial stereotypes. Mattel’s effort to recognize different cultures is flawed, because they relied on racial stereotypes in designing multi-cultural Barbie’s. By molding the black Barbie with arch backs to make their butts look bigger and thicker lips, Mattel is commodifying racial difference to make a profit.

Another interesting problem with Barbie is the affect the doll has on children’s self-esteem and ideas about what is beautiful in our culture. The article points to studies done on black children that show that they often desired white Barbie and felt the black Barbie were undesirable.

The essay also explores how Barbie’s design is a reflection on America’s true cultural values and wants.  Barbie’s thin body and blonde hair mirrors our societies beauty standards. Barbie’s extreme consumer lifestyle is a reflection of our own.  In a way, Barbie is an unflattering look at what we as a culture really desire.

The weather was sunny and warm as shoppers entered the corridors of Spotsylvania Mall on Friday, October 10 at 2:00 p.m.  There were three patterns that I noticed in the mall. First, the mall stores seemed to serve the daily needs of the individual customers. Second, the mall also served a large racially diverse demographic and addressed the needs of men, women, and children. Third, the line between public and private space is blurred in the mall’s corridors.

Many of stores seem to be aimed at the needs of women and children. Hot Topic, which sold body jewelry, clothes and tee shirts with rock band logos, was aimed at the younger audience. I saw a woman with three kids shopping in the store. She was buying things for her kids. The mall did not leave men out in their consideration. There are several stores that focused more on men. In the Game Stop, there were guys of all ages checking out video games and playing in-store video game demos.

I noticed that the majority of people had shopping bags in their hand. In some cases, shoppers were carrying more then one type of bag, suggesting that they were shopping at multiple stores and were purchasing more items.  The mall seems like it is designed to satisfy most of consumers’ needs and wants. You can buy clothes, shoes, beauty products, sporting goods, video games and cell phones.

Hollister sold clothes that are aimed at a young and hip audience. The largest size of pants available on the shelf was a 32. In the retail space the level of light was very low and loud pop music blasted throughout the store. The strong smell of perfume was everywhere. In Hollister, there were only two customers in the store during my visit. They were both adults, in their late twenties to early thirties. Both customers held items in their hand they were thinking about purchasing. The employees at Hollister were all young.

There was a very diverse crowd of shoppers in Spotsylvania Mall. Men and women, both in groups and as single individuals shopped in the mall retail stores. I saw groups of families with kids shopping and a few small packs of teenagers walking around the mall. There were also many different people representing various racial groups, and I saw a large number of men working in various retail stores in the mall.  At Buzzy’s Play Park there were women and men watching over their kids as they played.

With one-step inside the narrow doorway at Spencer’s’ Gift you can sense an atmospheric change, similar to the feeling of leaving an air conditioned house a warm summer day. Inside the store, dim light and loud music leaves you with the feeling that you just entered a house party. Merchandise covers almost every inch of the space and customers walk around checking out various products. They sold costumes, tee shirts, jewelry, and sex toys. Off in the corner a woman used her cell-phone to take a picture of the man she was with trying on a pink wig. The low lights and music breed an air of comfort, similar to hang out at home or a friend’s house.

People appear to be comfortable in the mall. They do things that would usually be reserved for their private spaces at home. In one of the small boutiques called Perfect Eyebrows, which was located in the middle of the walking aisle, a woman relaxing in a recline position has her eyebrows pluck by a service worker. At a similar boutique called Ultra Bright Smile, I saw a woman siting in a reclined position with a glowing neon blue instrument in her mouth to have her teeth cleaned.  These women agreed to have private aspects of their personal lives and hygiene broadcast to all who happened to be walking by. For them it seems that the mall really is an extension of the domestic space.

Overall the mall seems to serve as a general store because it servers multiple needs of consumers from clothing, entertainment, health and beauty. I felt comfortable in the mall, but I would only shop there if I needed something that I could not find somewhere else. I did not personally connect with the space because it seems artificial and too pre-package for my taste.