It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that most of the choices that seem to dictate the course of our lives are illusionary, and that genetics, together with continuous conditioning, makes deviance or even mild variation virtually impossible.

I have a great friend, a photographer who has always wanted to be a photo-journalist; that is: a photographer whose work illustrates in a coherent series of images some essential truth about life somewhere in the world. In the meantime, he has taken more mundane and marketable work; he illustrates glossy calendars of European countries for the American market; capturing images of donkeys and baroque belfries in Spain; Norman keeps and highland cattle in Britain; donkeys and pipers in Ireland. By cropping out the bustle and detritus of modern urban life, by shooting at dawn or dusk and composing his photographs with skill and artifice, he offers to Americans an idyllic Europe; bright and unspoiled. It’s not the truth but it’s not lying either. It does involve a certain amount of hiding and revealing. True photojournalism is all revealing and no hiding; studio photography is all hiding and no revealing.

He was walking aimlessly around Dublin City when he met another photographer, who told him that there was to be a small reception and lecture given by the Getty Stock Photo Agency at a venue very nearby. Any Irish photographer or photographer working in Ireland was invited; the subject was basically ‘What Getty Wants from You Guys These Days’. As at any such function in Dublin, there were to be complimentary drinks.

Not being one to refuse either professional advice or a free cocktail; off went my friend to the top floor of an exclusive shopping centre, where there were vodka martinis handed out by smiling blonde hostesses to an assortment of local professionals who smiled at their friends or ignored their enemies.

After a period of conversation, the talk began. Like many such a lecture, it was given by a marketing executive; sharp-suited, fresh-faced and brusque; confident that the information that he was sharing was bona fide; part of that absolutely unimpeachable because democratic canon of truth gleaned from focus groups, extensive random-sampling and professionals such a psychologists and sociologists. This is the truth that wins elections, sways public opinion and desire; above all it sells everything that we use. It is no longer open to question; it is the greatest power in the developed world today; far more potent than the religion whose images and archetypes it has annexed. My friend was being told about the images that modern Ireland would respond to: the images that would sell Ireland; he was therefore being informed about the nature of modern Ireland; he was being told who he was and who were the people standing around him.

The most important point made was that images of Ireland should no longer focus on group-activities but on the individual. This might seem odd; that people acting alone should be popular in a country that has for so long depended on it’s communal activities; the family; the Church; sports organisations, pub-culture and musical groups. It’s not that these things have vanished from Irish life; just that they had to be approached from the point of view of the individual. In a photograph of a hurling game; the emphasis should be on a single player; his heroic exertion; his lonely, heroic achievement; his victory as a winner; man of the match. The other players might exist but they are a blur in the background; supporting players in his personal drama.

This literal focus on a pin-sharp individual wholly isolated or surrounded by vague and impressionistic extras; this was the key-note approach to be used everywhere. Call it the spot-light. You don’t share it with anyone; the businessman clinches his deal; the sportswoman breaks the white tape; the musician is lost in his or her art; the socialite dominates the circle of listeners in the bar. The best possible image is the familiar one of the muscular bare-handed rock climber who ‘clasps the crag with crooked hands’ in his world in the sky; advertising everything from shoes to soft-drinks to student loans.

Everyone wants to be special; to feel like an individual or at least like a member of a select group. Walk about any city and you will see people who can be categorized according to any number of categories. Remember rockers? That subgroup has sub-split into many others; goth, grind-core, pop-rock, AOR, nu-metal; not to mention the thousands of people who buy the music who don’t adopt the identity. There is little or no connection between these sub-groups; the grind-core fan has nothing but contempt for the kid who likes nu-metal and they both hate Christian-rock.

This is a crude example; music has always had its cliques, its costumes, and its divisions, primarily because adolescents since the 1950’s have used music as a way of defining their emerging identity and expressing their passions and dissatisfaction with the world around them. Now that adolescence is growing; people no longer emerge from a period of chaotic self-definition; they continue to define and redefine themselves throughout their 20s and into their 30s. They have ‘quarter-life crises’ at 25; 30 is the ‘new 20’ and 60 is now middle age. It has long been said that you are only as old as you feel, but we are getting to the point where none of us know how old we feel at all. I am 30: does that mean that I am old? Should I grow up? Should I get a mortgage or continue buying designer clothes? Am I a married father or a sexy stud? Should I set up a pension or go snow-boarding? The market tells us that we should do both; that the one doesn’t exclude the other. This is a very confusing and expensive proposition; no doubt people feel frustrated.

The original ‘generation gap’ was a marketing tool designed to split the family, society, into two parts. People talk about how homosexuals are attacking the family, but consumer capitalism has been chipping away at it for decades. Convince young people that they are completely different from their parents and that they will never become their parents, nor should they. Grandparents are a different species and small children are pests. Now you have at least two markets; the one defined against the other. Easy.

The real problem is that they didn’t stop there. With our help, the marketers have continued to split the atom; slicing society into thinner and thinner pieces along social, sexual, political, class-based and aesthetic lines. Some of these areas are allowed to cross-pollinate; athletic heterosexual men start bleaching their hair and wearing pink polo shirts; whilst gay men adopt the Abercrombie and Fitch uniform that began it’s career defined as ‘rugged and heterosexual’. Present generations ransack the past for inspiration: Tom Ford’s Gucci revolution virtually reversed the flow of modern feminism. (Ironically Ford is a gay man and gay men have modern feminism to thank for virtually everything they have achieved since the 1960’s.) Ethnic tattoos become an epidemic; a rash of Me-ness. Who wouldn’t hire a waiter because his has a tattoo these days? How long will it be before sober business suits completely vanish from the workplace? ‘Real men’ complain about ‘metro-sexuality’ and run to take refuge in a faux-masculinity based on off-road vehicles, boot-camp exercise regimes and beer. Everything is celebrated; everything else is reviled. Everything has camp value; everything is me.

I cannot think of a single person who cannot be catagorised according to an ever-lengthening list of market-types; each with its own guidelines and characteristics? As Bill Hicks sarcastically remarked; “The anti-marketing-market? That’s a great market!” Red ribbons changed charity into consumerism and an expression of personal allegiance to liberal values. Now Americans wear yellow-ribbons to declare allegiance to the US military. How do you sell charity to jocks, who think ribbons are gay? The Livestrong yellow rubber wrist-band makes a masculine statement about yourself, supposedly fights cancer, celebrates an athletic (non-gay) hero, and it costs nothing to produce.

The Getty Photo Archive is just telling Irish photographers what the situation is, and has been for many years now. Despite its pretensions towards hyper-modernity, Ireland has habitually been five or ten years behind the nations that it most seeks to emulate; the United States and Britain. A quick glance at the posters for the present elections reveals how little Irish politicians know, or want to know about marketing personality. Flat green rectangles with some indifferently-photographed apparatchik staring out at the viewer; a party logo; a meaningless slogan; empty of imagery, connotation or nuance. Maybe this is very clever; maybe Irish people are uninterested in personality politics. Or maybe this is just an economy with a coastline around it and nobody cares about anything but tax-breaks and property-prices. Politics is the poor cousin of consumer culture and we express ourselves, not through politics but consumption.

There is no ‘Me’ in democracy.