Dylan
Rubin.
This mini concentration focuses on commodities and high fashion. I wanted to explore how our society highly values certain items and goods because they're from a name brand or because everyone else has it. Humans only communicate with each other through objects - our clothes, possessions, and even the vacations we go on dictate who we are to other people. These ideas were inspired by Karl Marx’s Commodity Fetishism, in which he critiques the political economy and introduces the idea of social relationships existing in production instead of between people as economic relationships.
I went to a store in New York City to take these photos. In the store, there were countless expensive shoes packaged with sealed plastic and shirts in protective cases. I used high contrast in some of the photos to make everything pop, like an advertisement would.
