August 4, 2016
Shopping on the Periphery
Ulrich, who teaches photography at RISD, began his Copia project in 2001 as an exploration of the American retail landscape. The vast majority of Ulrich’s documentary work was done in the suburbs: at strip malls, in parking lots, at the threshold of a local IKEA. A decade or more after Ulrich began his project, these liminal areas still hold the key to understanding the design landscape of American commerce: despite the growing presence of online sales, more than 90 percent of American retail sales still occur in a traditional bricks and mortar environment.
The Copia project surveys that environment, including not only photographs, but also the detritus of suburban expansion, like forgotten blue prints. In assembling a picture of twentieth-century American retail and its ephemera, Ulrich presents a new way of thinking about suburbs. Rather than being seen as a tired landscape of commuter-belt housing, the suburbs emerge as something new: a place where Americans continually navigate new relationship with consumer goods and the material world.
In Ulrich’s photos of the crowded store aisles and abandoned shopping, it seems possible to grade the character of suburbia by the nature and density of consumer goods for sale. Ulrich’s America is a place where variety is produced by moving up and down the socio-economic retail ladder, rather than traveling from one geographic region to another. Suburbia, it becomes clear, is a product of land prices and consumer purchasing power, a netherworld where the surrounding population is dense and mobile enough to shop, but where commercial leases remain inexpensive enough for retailers to profitably display and process merchandise on a massive scale.
In its ideal form, suburbia is supposed to present a harmonious balance of the natural and the manmade: a place where a heteronormative couple might raise children in bucolic surroundings. Yet this vision proved difficult to build. The manmade all too often overran the natural. Developers’ greed all too frequently overran utopian dreams of generous open spaces. The generically named Rolling Acres Mall, located on the outskirts of Akron, Ohio, was shuttered in 2008, shortly before Ulrich captured this image. Like a Victorian deathbed photograph, Ulrich’s image captures the stillness of the mall’s metaphorical skin and bones after the life force has left the building. Nature looks ready to take its course, the semi-tropical plants ignorant of any Midwestern gale which may have been raging outside Rolling Acres’ dated interior world of fairground lights and glass-capsule elevators.
Observed
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Observed
By Victoria Solan
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