talk about these two photos, please

CHINA

is the first lollies and other consumer crazy non-essentials but the second bread (i.e. one of life's staples)....

Who's deciding what is and is not essential? Is the first one *all* lollies anyway?

ok i'm sure you knew what i meant... the first one looks like loads of colourful packaging, which to me suggests marketing and impulse buying and processed foods. and frankly no i don't think lollies are essential.

The bottom one isn't Robert Frank, it's Robert Adams.

The B & W shot tells you immediately what you're looking at, in fact invites you to say: "Oh, it's bread." To me it seems a picture of excess that's reigned itself in a little: here's a whole lot of bread on a shelf. You, the viewer, will probably not eat this much bread this year, or even in the next several years taken together. It's almost a balance between sufficiency and excess: you could make toast for your entire block with that shelf & everybody'd be happy except for the heretic toast-haters. In the color shot, you can't imagine WHAT you'd do with all the stuff in it: you can't even really say for sure what it is. It's just "a lot." Not uninteresting for that, but a little menacing to me, whatever its sheen.

Gursky's supermarket is the supermarket cloth that one cuts all supermarkets from. I'm not sure if that photo is a stitch job, it probably is, but if it is then in essense it contains all supermarkets that ever were and ever will be. Monet's impressions have a timelesness about them, whereas the gursky phot seems to contain all times within it. YOu feel as if you could turn a corner down one of thinfinite aisles and enter the supermarket in the lower picture, or even one not even conceived yet. It's the power of the un-tethered image. The image is not of a particular supermarket but of the idea of supermarkets.

and it wears me out.

Adams' photograph reminds me the American prairie/desert landscape, flat and plain, one mile the same as the previous, one shelf, one loaf of bread the same as the previous.

(nb I also like the Gursky)

xpost milo your description of the American prairie (v. different from the desert, I'd note) is wildly inaccurate

That may be a bigger issue for me than the problems of Internet display - I feel like both of these require the full body of work around them - Gursky's parliaments and soccer matches, the rest of Adams' Denver photos. Just as Gursky's relies on the scale, work like Adams - commentary on specific places, space and change, needs context.

Gursky's is like overlooking the Grand Canyon, 'how do you get across that?', but both are saying pretty much the same thing, the loss of self in a consumer society.

For all the talk of context, I like it this way. I would never see the photo otherwise.

Anyway, carry on, y'all! This is interesting.

as with this painting the repetition of images in the above photographs renders the image ultimately solipsistic- the mind cannot absorb the enormity of endless bread/pastries, so it turns on itself and the viewers' inadequacy in relation- i.e. "I cannot afford any of that food"

The first photo in the original post reminds me of some of the supermarkets I've been in in Mexico. All the neon-colored packaging and old-style shelving with unnaturally glossy ceilings and extremely bright lighting. They unnerve me a bit. I'm used to more muted colors, arranging that's less crowded, etc.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe the point of the first photo is to make the viewer feel uncomfortable. I know I wouldn't want to stay in that supermarket for very long. On the other hand, the second photo seems a bit more inviting, like you could stick around for thirty minutes just inhaling the faint aroma of bread and going through the selection of bread to figure out which loaf you want to take home. Maybe the black and white of the photo is meant to soothe, to welcome.