Balazs Simonyi © 2017
Home 2.0 (2008-2010)

A shopping mall generation – the plaza kids.

I took pictures of young people living in districts of block of flats for years. I tried to get closer to their world, activities, and pursuits. While mapping and capturing their ways of life, I inevitably visited the “temples of consumer culture,” the modern sacred spaces of spending money and killing time: the malls.

Today these metropolitan malls offer various forms of entertainment, a place to hang out and to build connections, opportunities for satisfying one’s desires and for finding pleasure and ephemeral gratifications. It is the second home for many young people, both individually and communally. The mall is the Promised Land; it is the central place of glitter, fashion, and entertainment. It serves as a cultural and moral point of reference and a multi-functional center for meeting with others. Enchanted by the mall culture, the blase and loitering youth, gone weary of the world due to a fad or some kind of fashionable attitude, is a contemporary phenomenon. Teenagers were born into a ready made situation; for them, the existence of the mall is evident. They are referred to as the shopping mall generation that is surrounded, pampered and catered to by this delusional artificial world.

The photo series made by a 50mm lens is the visual imprint of the lethargic and jaded mall lifestyle primarily characterized by a sense of hanging around – as subjectively perceived and conceived by the photographer between 2008 and 2010.

Article about the series from Fotóművészet 2010/2. Article on Divany.hu lifestyle magazine.Report on RTL. Opening speech by Zsolt Demetrovics (2010 December, Marczi gallery). Opening speech by Levente Kiraly poet (Szekesfehervar, Oreghegyi Kozossegi Haz, 2011. 02.18.)

József Pécsi Photography Grant – 2010 (Archive website of the grant here.)

(Shot in digital.)