Small Stores
Today we are constantly hit by images of the shopping experience. Advertising is everywhere and big stores like Save on Foods, Home Depot, Mall outlets, MacDonald’s, try to create an idea of what shopping is supposed to be like. It’s supposed to be happy, bright, clean, and it’s all processed so that you’re supposed to like what they have and what they do. Convenience stores and other privately owned stores are the exact opposite of this in both good and bad ways, but the images of this kind of shopping and stores are never seen. I wanted to show it. Convenience stores and privately owned stores are mostly run by immigrants who own and run their own business. They don’t wear uniforms. They deal mostly in people’s vices – junk food, lottery tickets, cigarettes and time wasters like Hollywood or foreign movies. They also deal with the poor – people who don’t have cars. Their security systems and other electronics are old. The stores are a little rundown. On the positive side they are neighbourhood stores. The customers are all kinds of people and people talk. They don’t treat the customers and workers like machines at the cash register. The owners have stories. Sometimes they have given up great lives in another country to give their children a better life in Canada and they’re now doing the less interesting less lucrative job of running a store. Sometimes they came to Canada to escape violence in their home country. My idea is to create something that will suggest a different kind of experience that people hardly think about or see because they are surrounded by advertising of the happy big corporation.
Just the fact that I will be taking pictures outside and inside convenience stores and privately owned stores says a lot about the differences. There’s no way that a big box store would allow it. I will try to make the comparison as interesting as possible by taking pictures of exteriors, faces, products, hands and transactions. It will be complemented with text about the lives of the people, and possibly pictures for comparison.
I will be using a digital camera. I will shoot in day time light or night time after school and in the early morning on weekends. There are few store owners who have already said they are willing to be in my blog. My plan is to take some pictures in one place once a week. I will shoot pictures so that people would not be posing for me. For faces, I will try to make them as attractive as possible to try to make clear the personal nature of convenience stores and privately owned stores.
I will write progress reports as the pictures are taken for my own use. They will tell me what I should change. They will be a record of new ideas while I’m working.
I feel that the strongest component of my blog is to communicate an inner message which conveys a different approach of thinking about convenience stores and privately owned stores. By constructing a blog with the pictures taken in different places and times together, it will be obvious to see that each of the convenience store and privately owned store owners together have similarities but have different stories. It is also a creative and an original idea I came up with on my own.
