Brian Ulrich's work explores our relationship to consumerism in the post 9/11 economic and social environment. His work uses the camera as a way to create a space in which the viewer can become critical of capital driven environments. While searching for a way to capture the the new social interactions that formed after 9/11 Ulrich was inspired to move indoors to retail spaces upon the "fight terror go shopping" moment. In photographing he found that rather than the interactions between people, the interactions between people and the products and spaces they engaged with were the most interesting relationships to examine. sometimes his work is exclusively about the retail spaces whether they are in use such as the shots taken inside home depot and target but in the more recent work he turns his camera toward the collapsing and abandoned architecture of former retail spaces.
I found his analytical statements about consumer culture and consumer spaces to be of great value to my work. In talking about retail spaces and his photographs of them he mentions how the architecture is designed to wear down the consumer, to make them feel small and to never allow them the space to engage critically with the environment. In his photographs the objects often become stand ins for people not within the frame documenting their traces left behind.
No comments:
Post a Comment