Brian Ulrich

After looking at consumerism in Photography and the current capitalist society in which we all live in, we began to explore photographers such as Eugene Atget, Barbra Kruger and Andreas Gursky, all of whom have documented the rise in capitalism, focussing mainly on retail in their work. 
After spending some time looking analysing the work of these photographers, we were introduced to Brian Ulrich's work on consumerism, which takes a very different view point. Instead of photographing large retail stores like Gursky, Ulrich adopted the project of document thrift shops in America. 

As a group, we chose Ulrich's image 'untitled (2006) 0614' shown below:

This photograph was part of a series exhibited at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art , Overland Park, KS in 2008. The subject of the image VHS' is something that is not sold often anymore due to the release of higher platform film distributions such as DVD's and Bluray's. They are considered retro and are currently unwanted items that have very little to no monetary value. This is what makes Ulrich's photographs different to others that have been used to document consumerism, he is photographing what are essentially unwanted items, and yet people fill up their trolleys with these items, still consuming these un-needed objects.

People usually shop because it is a sense of stress relief, as displayed in the common phrase 'retail therapy', they do it because it makes them feel better about themselves. After seeing a poster of a beautiful woman wearing a TopShop dress, the viewer then thinks that by purchasing that object, they too will be beautiful. We the human race have this constant need to fill our lives with products to try and make ourselves seem appealing to other people. 

Moving on to the technical analysis of the photograph, it was taken on a medium format SLR, and the colours of the image seem to have been saturated making it extremely bold. I think that the colours were enhanced to give the image more of a sense of consumerism, as a lot of the time when people are trying to sell you something they use simple but effective techniques in order to try and divert your attention to them, essentially making you want to buy the product. Making a product bright will hypothetically catch your attention making you essentially want to buy the product.

The image critiques consumerism as well though, with the use of the smaller scale image, and with the rest of the series, which shows a lot of people and not so many products.

The composition of the image is very similar to those taken by Gursky, with the shelves dividing up the image, very much like the photographs Gursky took of the sides of buildings. I think that as an image by itself, it is very much a consumerist image that captures the extent of the capitalist society we live in, but when it is in the series it shows how much it really does contrast the standard documenting images of consumerism.

I find consumerism and capitalism to be a very interesting topic when related to photographic documentation, and feel it is something I would enjoy reading more about in the future, and possibly doing a photographic project of my own on it as well.