Observation

Large metropolises are hubs of tourism and trade. Deals are done, money is made and there is always something new and exciting happening in every large city on the planet. But this is just the surface of city life. The city cries out for the attention of tourists and foreign investment, saying “look at me I’m unique.” The truth is that although every city has a unique ‘feel’ to it there is one big thing that makes all cities, from Manchester to Ho Chi Minh, indistinguishable from one another. That is the people who live there. The populations of cities are stuck in a cycle and the process is being played out in every city on the planet. In large cities this is particularly the case. Regardless of the social or political culture of any particular place there are many things that make, for example, Ho Chi Minh City, the largest city in Communist Vietnam very similar to New York City, the largest in capitalist America, and it is this cycle of work, commute, sleep which is reinforced by the demands of the society in which we live. The status quo is maintained by the ruling class through offering welfare to other classes, such as basic healthcare or small financial benefits, so that the members of this working underclass come to identify with the system and accept, to a degree, their subaltern role. In Gramscian and neo-Gramscian theory this type of control is called cultural hegemony. It is due in part to this cultural hegemony that the ruling class has been able to create an urban middle class whose conservatism reflects the benefits it derives from the system: status, and a degree of security, though the latter has been jeopardised by neoliberalism. This project started out as purely anthropologic, I wanted to make a collection of images of people, mainly in cities, from across the world. As the project evolved and developed, it became apparent that I had been creating the same images regardless of what city I happened to be in. These similarities, however unintentional, have provided the basis for my project. These similarities, irrespective of a people’s heritage, beliefs or political systems, make the general populace of cities appear to be the same. Forced to compete in the rat race through accepting small benefits in exchange for their ‘freedom’, they are therefore happy to live as subjugates in order to retain their place within society. This project consists of my observations of people who are isolated from the world in which they live but all of whom have one big thing in common with each other. That is the fact that they are united through subjugation.