Xmas Consumption

Photographed during the Christmas shopping period of 2020 at Westfield Chermside and Westfield Carindale, this series examines consumerism as a form of collective herd behaviour.

From elevated viewpoints, shoppers become less distinct as individuals and more visible as a moving herd. Long exposures dissolve bodies into streams, clusters and repeated paths, suggesting a herd drawn through the architecture of consumption. Escalators, balconies, shopfronts and atriums guide the flow, directing people toward the next purchase, the next display and the next promise of satisfaction.

The shopping centre appears as both marketplace and machine: carefully designed to circulate bodies, sustain desire and turn movement into consumption. Christmas intensifies this ritual. Urgency, abundance and repetition merge as the crowd moves through a landscape built around wanting, acquiring and carrying away.

Seen from above, personal choice begins to resemble collective compulsion. The individual shopper disappears into a larger choreography of buying, browsing and following. These images ask whether consumption is an expression of freedom, or a pattern we enter together—moving with the herd through spaces designed to keep us wanting more.