KJamie Smith

This year almost three quarters of a million used vehicles no longer able to meet road standards or that are simply no longer desirable, will be shipped from the global north to Africa alone, more than half of which will come from Europe. ‘Aftermarket’ follows this journey in West Africa. Through repairs, paper-work, bureaucratic offices, and the re- purposing of this consumer surplus, these products are transformed in preparation for their second, sometimes third lives.

As European Governments wash their hands of the old and embrace the new, the question of who bears the responsibility of what was, arises. Using documentary photography, constructed images and life-size perspective warped environments, the project re-frames spaces as unstable environments. How complicit are we in existing structures of global trade and cultural representations?

Jamie Smith (b. 1997) is a London-born, Amsterdam-based photographer whose work examines how consumer culture can shape identity and representations of “the other.” Moving between commercial tropes, documentary languages and constructed imagery, he tests what photographs can credibly show.

His practice uses photography to enter and destabilise visual systems around consumption and power, asking how cultural perceptions become visible, normalised and enforced through image-making. By reworking familiar aesthetic codes, Jamie invites audiences to consider where representation ends and responsibility begins, questioning not only how we are taught to see the world, but how we come to see ourselves within it.