Laurence Cuelenaere

A Language of Things, Interrupting the Circulating Reality within a Visual Practice

A Language of Things, Interrupting the Circulating Reality within a Visual Practice is a commentary on photography as grounded in a circulatory digital regime, possessing the capacity to represent our longings as communicative capitalism adds its own filters to our shared experience (through emails, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook,academia, and online shopping sites like Amazon). Product photography typically uses professional apparatuses, which tend to create a floating visual narrative of how material reality should look and how it should be used.

This thesis seeks to interrupt the universal language of product photography while provoking a re-examination of how corporate media invades our lives through consumption. Instead of being bound to the small-scale routines of daily life, the objects unfold onto the world of trade, further absorbing them into the abstract commercial—yet shared—networks of communicative capitalism. With a hint of sardonic humor and intentional simplicity, the images underscore the ironies, longings,and incongruences implied in the production of the material wealth surrounding us. The viewer is related to the scenes not only through a sense of discomfort, appetite, or routine but also through their digital connection with today's product photographs.