ABSTRACT
In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
(Debord 1967: section 1)
In the twenty-first century, commodity relations rule our lives to such an extent that we are often unaware of them as a specific set of historical, social and economic relations which human beings have constructed. Like any cultural and technical development, the development of photography has been influenced by its social and economic context. The photograph is both a cultural tool which has been commodified as well as a tool that has been used to express commodity culture through advertisements and other marketing material. Capitalism’s exploitation of the mass media and visual imagery to create an array of spectacles and illusions that promote commodity culture can be explored by considering some of the ideas that the French Situationist Guy Debord discussed in his book Society of the Spectacle (Debord 1967).1
