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84 Consuming Media

visual forms are used to communicate ideas about aesthetic value and hierarchy, about
history and power within the context of specific cultural environments. We consider,
first, the commercial pictures of products, how they represent, their intermediality and
how they are used to inscribe hierarchies of value. From this more general considera-
tion of images, we then shift the focus to specific visual media and the chain of
consumption that takes its point of departure in the shops selling these products. Here
the focus is on photographs, cards and posters, and the technology used in their
production and use.

PICTURES IN THE MALL
In Chapter 1, we described the visual environment as an expression of the histories
and conflicts over Solna Centre as a place. Here, the focus is on the specific charac-
teristics of the images displayed in the shopping centre environment, where they are
found and the values they construct. This is not an exhaustive analysis of all the
images on display in the shopping centre, but is based on a selection, with the aim of
understanding how images work in this environment in relation to hierarchies of
power and value.
We begin with the most obvious – the pictures that advertise goods that are for sale
in the shopping centre. In shop windows photographs are used repetitively, often
citing another item in the window, or even repeating themselves. They frequently
engage a visual play with scale, showing for example an oversized copy or details of
an object. Poster formats are the most common, suspended in the window or
mounted onto the display in a wide range of sizes. Pictorial illustrations, including
photographs, have been common in advertising since the rise of mass consumer
publications in the 1890s, but what is noteworthy here is their use behind glass. The
show window was a display form originally developed to protect attractive goods
from weather, dust and the consumer’s touch; now we find instead the expendable
mass-produced image dominating the shop window, sometimes even replacing the
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object it represents. Why has the photograph replaced the goods in this display
form? Let us look at some examples.
In the cellphone shop, three-foot-tall photographic enlargements of the latest cell-
phone model provide a practical solution to presenting objects that are too small or
too valuable to stand so exposed in the expanse of a show window. More significant,
however, is the visual impression of power and value established through the repeti-
tion and large scale of the images. In other windows photographs represent products
being used, a common strategy in shops selling sports equipment or children’s
clothing. In these cases, the image is often less distinct or even blurred, conveying a
sense of movement or a mood, while the product itself is unclear. The object being
advertised is on display, too – the sports shoe, the child’s winter parka – a concrete sign
next to the photograph that represents the product as a swash of colour. We are
presented simultaneously with the product and its image, a photographic image that
projects the desired qualities associated with the product – power, luxury, style, fun,
etc. – but that are not evident in the product alone. The real object and the hyper-real