RETAIL
The long-term project called “Copia” sees Brian Ulrich engaged for seven years in a kind of visual anthropological exploration of the so-called culture of consumerism. He travels through the United States tracing what we might venture to define as a new geography of homogenization. Representing a wide and transversal world of malls and department stores, strongly characterized as confusing, through portraits so merciless as to appear delicate, imbued with an almost existentialist poetic, leaves no way out and forces the viewer to question the ironclad logic that underlies this model of economic development even before the social and political, which has long shown its limits. The huge fluorescent lit big box stores that everyday dispense multicolored objects and conscript willing supporters of the common cause, that of the economic recovery of a country that for its survival is constrained to equate consumerism and patriotism, appear as magnificent creaking temples, winking portals wide open to a inevitable vacuum, which sometimes is reflected in the faces, more frightened than unaware, of those who pass through these places every day.
© All copyright remains with photographer Bryan Ulrich