These images are really...something. The fact that they had operated and closed meant that so many people lost jobs and opportunities when they shut down. But I guess it's really a wake up call that current lifestyle is very outdated and we need to look for other methods of sustainable economic progress.
I hope many people who view this images share the same thought as I do that it is more than necessary to update and adapt our lives to the current economic and social situation of the country.
Juan Miguel Ruiz (Going Green)
http://www.GreenJoyment.com
Circuit City, Ponderosa Steakhouse, 2008. [All photos by Brian Ulrich, from Is This Place Great Or What, Aperture, 2011
Randall Park Mall, 2008.
Beginning in 2001, Ulrich used his camera to chart the arc of America’s consumer landscape. From 2008-2011 he completed a series called Dark Stores, pictures of malls that had begun emptying out even before the great recession.
Dominicks, 2008.
It would be easy to read these images as a sort of visual existential crisis — Pax Americana caught wide-eyed in the flashbulb moment after its debt-saddled economy finally began to implode. But it’s also possible to read them as incredibly optimistic. These places, so haunting when emptied of shoppers, are precisely what the future of cities won’t be like.
Circuit City, 2010.
Big box stores, mindless consumerism, shopping as a competitive sport, sterile expanses of shop floor and parking lot that are the antithesis of walkable, mixed-use communities — this is their epitaph.
Rose, Northridge Mall, 2010.
Ulrich’s series Dark Stores is on view now at the Cleveland Museum of Art. His monograph is available now. For more images from the series, as well as commentary from the artist himself, check out his post on Is This Place Great Or What at Design Observer.
