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FURTHER REDUCTIONS

Report

'This is our Britain. A brightly lit, canned announcement, community hall of consumption'

The supermarket is to the British family what a boulangerie is to the French. We flock to it in our thousands, shopping lists in hand, loyalty cards in our back pockets, children strapped unwillingly into the trolley seat. We come for the comfort, we come for the convenience, but above all else, we come for the special offers.

A man, looking to throw a party perhaps, weighs in either hand the two largest melons he can find. A young couple saunter the shelves, locked in a fierce embrace. A man with gonks on his wheelchair and a smile on his face traverses the fridge section with four tubs of margarine in his basket. The photographs show us a picture of the Britain of today, a multicultural place where everybody, young, old, regardless of religion and colour, wants to get the best value food. Because if nothing else, Northern Britain is a nation united in its love of a bargain.

Here you'll see kids staring glumly out of trolleys or lying rictus in boredom. A teenage girl, wishing she was at home playing Minecraft, yawns in front of a display of Pot Noodles. When they're not crying to be fed or trying to strangle their siblings, children lean against the trolley handles, looking almost neurologically impaired by the boredom of it all: by being in the supermarket... again.

Because here's the truth about going to the supermarket, almost nobody wants to be here. You can see it in the folded arms, in the grim looks of determination in almost every shot. People don't come for the experience. They come because they have to. It's the cheapest and quickest way to get everything they need in one go. There's nothing aspirational about it.

And all the way around, shoppers clutch their lists. Scraps of paper torn from notepads, hand-scribbled and written anew every week - Margarine. Bread. Tea. Asprin. The list-havers always come home with what they set out to buy, no more, and no less, because there's nothing more disheartening than getting home and realising you've forgotten to buy milk... again.

All forms of human life are here, in the anonymous shelving, a true portrait of our national eccentricity.

These photographs are evidence of us as we really are. Unaware, and unposed, it shows us going about our business as usual, traversing the shop in a sort of dream. It shows us at our best, at our very ordinariest.

*This is only a small sampling of a larger selection of images. (There are 50 images in total).