Artist Lecture #2: Brian Ulrich

I was amused by Brian Ulrich's lecture. He continuously was poking fun and dropping jokes about his work. Ulrich is a dedicated artist; constantly traveling cross country to shoot and his allegiance to film is very admirable. He shoots with a medium format, using 4x5 and 8x10 view waist level viewfinder which is extremely difficult given the lighting situations he accouters. The advantage of using these cameras, Ulrich succeeded in capturing many close portraits of people in public settings. He explained that this is credited to not having to hold the camera up to his face. The downside of using these large cameras is shooting in variety of low light settings. I laughed when Ulrich claimed that for one of his shots, he had to grab a shopping cart and balance his camera.

Ulrich's work addresses consumerism, pertaining to something he called "Patriotic Shopping." This idea derived from his perception of the event, 9/11 and President Bush's request to fix the downsizing American economy by calling for Americans to shop. Ulrich began his quest to capture the emotions of a shopping war-zone. Starting at loading and unloading zones at the various mega stores of IKEA, Target and Costco, his images reflect a seemingly trance state of the buyers. Their physical actions; of holding products, reaching for items, pushing shopping carts all implicate these mega stores of intimidating shoppers to make a purchase. Ulrich explains that there is a sort of pilgrimage to these stores and after being exhausted of touring through a maze of aisles, one would feel that they HAD to buy something after all the time spent. Ulrich continued to research and dissect this topic by photographing not only the shoppers but also the architecture of these consumer spaces. He mentions that these stores don't want you to photograph their property because they don't want you to begin to hyper analyze. Thus, just by his decisive action to photography these spaces, his work becomes political.

Ulrich's work that is probably most well-known is his "Dark Stores," series. Using a variety of online resources including google maps, he sought out closed mega stores and malls. This obsession lead him all over the country and he found many of these treasure troves hidden away. There, he generally photographed them in the dead of the night and encountered everything from foxes to lonely security guards.

These photographs gave me a strange sense of hope. I've always felt strongly about small privately own businesses being overrun by corporations and mega stores. Seeing stores such as Circuit City and Toys-R-Us being abandoned seemed ironic to me. Perhaps Ulrich's images seem like a boding prediction, a case study being put together, to show the up rise and downfall of a consumer society.

*I'm having trouble posting pictures. They will be coming soon*