Johnny Peckham, 2026
With The Last Tub of Cornish Vanilla Before Civilisation Collapses, Johnny Peckham accomplishes the seemingly impossible: he transforms the supermarket freezer into a site of metaphysical inquiry. At first glance, this is simply a depleted Tesco cabinet during a summer heatwave. On closer inspection, it reveals itself as a meditation on entropy, consumer desire, and the peculiar British tendency to panic-buy frozen desserts.
The composition possesses an almost Becher-like taxonomic rigour, yet the yawning white void where abundance ought to reside is unmistakably contemporary. It is less still life than still less. The empty shelves operate as a negative sculpture, recalling Yves Klein’s fascination with immateriality, while the surviving ice cream tubs huddle together like the last adherents of a forgotten cult.
One detects the spectral influence of Andreas Gursky in the retail vernacular, albeit stripped of excess. Where Gursky monumentalises capitalism through plenitude, Peckham arrives after the feast, presenting us with its curious aftermath: a refrigeration unit contemplating its own existential redundancy.
The price labels, meticulously aligned beneath absent commodities, become a form of accidental concrete poetry. Their insistence on value in the absence of product is almost Baudrillardian, a simulacrum of commerce continuing long after commerce itself has evaporated. Tesco, here, ceases to be a supermarket and becomes an epistemological proposition.
There is, too, quiet comedy. The photograph oscillates between ecological portent and the deeply local tragedy of discovering there are no Magnums left on a sweltering Tuesday afternoon. Peckham understands that the sublime and the ridiculous are separated only by a supermarket aisle.
In lesser hands, this would be just documentary. In Peckham’s, it is refrigerated phenomenology; an elegy for abundance, illuminated by fluorescent tubes and priced with impeccable optimism.