A Real Work of Art
explores the business of surface appearances through portraits of women whose job it is to create a façade. The work visually describes a number of retail sites as consisting of both consumption and production. A written text by Dave Beech for A Real Work of Art illuminates the groundwork of the research in historical terms. It highlights Rae’s ethics of attention in creating portraits of the overlooked. A video piece extends the act of looking to complement the still images in the series.
Excerpts from Carrie, Miranda and Christine Peace by Dave Beech
published in A Real Work of Art
In the imaginative world of Sex and the City (which presumably is not restricted to the TV series), shop workers are commonly represented but only with the anonymity of individuals in crowds. And here is where the ethics of Rae’s photographs is grounded: it recognises and challenges the unequal distribution of the value of individuals in our culture through redressing the unequal distribution of attention. Her use of portraiture to engage these questions is well-judged....
The Department Store is not a homogeneous, even space, it is split and internally ruptured by all the fissures that divide the social world, from the colonial sources of its merchandise to the surveillance of shoppers, not to mention the gendering of retail . It is a place of leisure and work, of spectacle and invisibility, distraction and calculation, seduction and boredom, excess and poverty. And these oppositions – the definitive oppositions of modernity and capitalism, in fact – are felt no stronger than in the everyday lives of shop workers at Department Stores. Shop workers were not the architects of modernity nor will they be the likely gravediggers of capitalism, but they keep the dreamworld of modern capitalism ticking over....
Working behind a counter in a Department Store may well mean drudgery but it also means living in close proximity to a flood of powerful dreams. The capital that buys your labour also pays for this abundance of jewellery, clothes, shoes, food, cosmetics, of everything you desire, to be brought together in row after row right before your eyes. To look at this excess with desire is to wish for a better life, which is why the Department Store is the arena of a kind of utopian thinking...