Brian Ulrich's work comments on the disfunctionality of American consumerism. From Chicago, Ulrich travels far and wide in search of his next photograph and through his travels and his willingness to immediately buy a plane ticket to an abandoned mall in another state just to photograph it before it was demolished shows his passion and deidication to his obsession.
Ulrich's works branch out yet still entirely stem from one another. His non-portraiture works of shopping centers, thrift stores, donation centers, junk hoards, grocery stores, and so on all show the complete grandeur of how wasteful American consumerism is, yet the images have a humorous poke to them. I enjoy the duality of the seriousness and the humorous he evokes within each image. This series also reminds me of Andreas Gursky in his use of composition and color.
Ulrich's portraiture takes the concept from his images on consumerism and includes the workers or the purchasers as another aspect to comment on. However, in his portraits the attention is directed towards and is about the person. Those connections with his lone figures are more important than their surroundings, but I believe it is their surroundings within consumerism that separate them from the true reality of the nature of the world which is what Ulrich is trying to communicate.
My favorite images were from his DeadMall series where he ventured at night to capture images of abandoned and deteriorating malls as another comment on the dying economy of the suburbs. Ultimately I feel he is photographing the future in these images or what he believes is the future for an unsustainable economy based off of consumerism. Buy and Discard, Buy and Discard, Buy and Discard. Those malls were bought and built in the 1970s and are now discarded left to rot.
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