Confessions of a Vending Machine

Continuing the project from last semester, myself and my friend visited the same toilets and purchased the items out of the vending machines with the intention of being able to show people exactly what was inside. At first, I had the idea of demystifying the items by displaying them in a scientific manner, such as in a vitrine, like what would be found in a museum or gallery space. After consideration, the project started moving in a different direction, as I realised a vitrine setting still maintained a certain distance from the viewer. I wanted a more tactile, ‘interactive’ experience. I started working on designing a sort of brochure or catalogue of the items, as if you were a prospective buyer looking to see what the machines had to offer.

After reflecting on all the options, I decided that the strength was in the actual photography, photographing the objects removed from their packaging digitally in the studio producing a series of scientific, abstract macro photographs. I decided the best way to play with the ideas of taboo, embarrassment, desire and secrecy was to totally abstract these things – by enlarging them many times their actual size, they become humorous, and attention is drawn to the textures and subtleties of each items surfaces. From afar they look like many things in everyday life; speeding trains, keyboard keys, oil paintings, but get up close and they become something entirely different. Works such as Kevin Newark’s Protoplasm, Nobuyoshi Araki’s various series of flowers, food and other objects in macro and Stephen Gill’s Above Ground works were influencing the final output.

My goal of the project was to show the viewer: these things are not dirty, or anything to avoid talking about. They are merely objects used for pleasure. Tacky, maybe, but they should not be taboo.

The final output was nine 40cm x 40cm digital Giclée colour prints, mounted on Dibond.

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Forty Eight Pub Bathrooms

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I continued the mode of probing into things unknown for my final year work. After a few visits to a local pub in Southampton, myself and a number of friends observed that there was a vending machine in the toilets, that sold vibrating cock rings and herbal viagra. This was a shock, considering the conservative nature of the clientele of over 50-60s who frequented the pub, its friendly staff and homely atmosphere. I decided to conduct a comprehensive exploration of this aspect of the drinking culture in Southampton, by visiting a great number of pubs all over the city to photograph the vending machines. I was interested to see if there is a correlation between an establishment’s typical patrons and the sort of products available to purchase in the toilets. As it went on, the project became just as much about the actual process of visiting these machines as it was about the final product. Myself and a female friend would visit a pub, buy a cheap drink in order to stay there long enough to covertly take a small film SLR into each of the men’s and women’s bathrooms to snap a photo of the vending machine. The end results were published in a book was titled “Forty Eight Pub Bathrooms”, a reference to Ed Ruscha’s Twenty Gasoline Stations, and contained text along with the images of the bathrooms (which incidentally, were sometimes without vending machines at all), of the drinks and food we purchased in the pubs, the price we paid, and anything interesting about the pub itself.

With my final project, I want to convey how the idea of desire, pleasure, and excitement, which are hidden in pub toilets, waiting to be sold as a last minute cheap thrill. Fantasy items, pleasure enhancers and, cheap novelties are sold on the premise that they will turn a flirty encounter into a lust-filled experience. Though any patron knows, even vaguely, what each package contains, no one would want to be caught buying one. The details of sex are still taboo, yet we all do it, we all know each one of us engages in both sex with a partner, and masturbation on our own, yet we turn a blind eye to these products designed to enhance these experiences. It’s not illegal to sell or buy them, so why is there such a stigma attached to buying them from these machines? What is it about the items that is so forbidden and taboo?

Global Cultures, Southampton

French’s Shoemakers, Southampton

A year later, for my ‘Concepts and Themes’ project, I worked with artwork in the Southampton City Art Gallery archive. The particular work I chose to work with was “A Sad Case Before The Bench”, Thomas Protheroe, 1891. The painting shows a cobbler standing behind a bench surrounding by tools, with a pair of broken shoes in his hand. Using this painting as my initial reference, I chose to explore the part of the city in which I was living at the time, the streets around the area called Bedford Place. Southampton is an old city, with many features still intact from hundreds of years ago, but very little trade in the city has survived that long. I was keen to see what, if any, interesting shops and traders held their ground, and soon after my initial foray into the city’s past, I came across one of the oldest shops in all of Southampton, French’s Shoemakers. This shop had been passed down through nine generations of the same family and was an exceptionally beautiful one, with many old features, both inside and out. However, after some initial shoots inside the shop, influenced by John Londei’s book Shutting Up Shop, I realised I was more interested in the parts that most customers would never get to see, like the workshop. After speaking to the manager and the technicians in the workshop I was even more intrigued. The manager himself had been a technician when he first started, and some of the employees had been there over 30 years. I started photographing the longstanding employees but found my real interest was in the tools that littered the workshop benches. Models of machines and hand tools that had not changed in 75-80 years were still in use at French’s. My final edit was a series of four black and white medium format 6×6 images of the old workshop tools and machinery. I printed these to 39cm x 39cm, hand printed and mounted on Dibond, and they were displayed in the Southampton City Art Gallery in that year.

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