Brian Ulrich photograph

http://notifbutwhen.com/projects/copia/dark-stores/#i13

It looks like the main, middle section of a mall. There are two or three levels but they extend wicked far back and curve. The store fronts seem to have iron fences and most of them are closed, but the emphasis of the photo is on this middle geometrically designed sculpture randomly hanging in the middle of the building under the light. It's turquoise and looks like six sides of a die were angled and overlapped and hung. The light above is dome like and has a diamond/ triangle circular design on it. There are a lot of patterns going on in this photo; the steps in a circle, the red velvet gate thing that makes rows in the lobby of a bank or a movie theater. The repetition of columns and black gates, they're all patterns. They seem to revolve around this circular lounge area in the mall. The artist uses pattern and repetition, so at a first glance it looks like there's a lot going on but really the only non drab color is turquoise. The rest is beige, white, black, brown, grey. The black design on the light and sculpture piece stands out. It looks kind of fruitless and banal in the room, elegant in sort of a tragic way. Perhaps more obviously Brian Ulrich is candidly photographing the banal, mundane aspects of consumerism and capitalism that we've become so immune to. He makes it look shocking, which is shocking to us because we've become used to it. We tend to overlook the intricacies of retail, thrift stores and shopping malls. The workers are invisible to us, the children in other countries manufacturing everything, none of that factors in. It's truthful, his body of work, and it's making a bold statement about how we live our lives: excessively. We're selfish. We're a NEED NEED NEED country. Our society is pretty unsettling to think about so we don't and just buy more stuff. In terms of art history it seems like he's got some photo journalist influences, but I don't know, photography isn't really my area of expertise. It's definitely inanely clear something's wrong with the lessons we're teaching our kids and the way things are at this moment in time.