Pleaser turncart shere (thankyou)
From October to November of 2020, I took 840 pictures of a shopping cart corral. I made some art out of it. The final product includes an exhibition of 409 of the images printed (due to space constraints) and a four-volume book with eight essays interspersed. Below are shots of the installation and images from the series interspersed among the first two essays in the book. If you’d like to order the book, shoot me an email
Essay #1: Marketplace of Ideas
“You’re a dumbass!”
-Man in a truck, to the artist.
The thing you're looking at no longer exists.
Of course, intrinsic to photography is a material deviation which creates an illusion of a moment of time hewn off from our daily experiences for the purposes of contemplation, nostalgia, commercial gain, etc. There is the sense that once light has bounced off a thing, betraying its form and color, and becomes fixed to a digital file or film, the subject is already different than when it was photographed, and only diverges further from there. People age. Cities change. Electrons move around. Any photograph's subject is a thing which no longer really exists, at least in the sense it once did. Yet we have a sort of faith which bridges the gap backwards. There is a faith in photography and faith in the thing. The shopping cart corral doesn't exist, and yet it does.
360°-ish view of the entire gallery show. 409’ images, 7.33” square, mounted centered at 59”.
But I mean, literally, this shopping cart corral doesn't exist anymore. Or it's buried under a pile at a landfill. At the very least, the parking lot and the corral and all the trees and curbs have been torn up and replaced with a new version of the same. Fresh, and made new. To get to the beginning, we start at the end. Let the reader understand.
I didn't know when this parking lot or its corral would meet their end when I began photographing. I would've known in an abstract sense that the corral must end at some point when I began, but its end was not truly in my mind when I started. But that calls to mind the most obvious question you're probably thinking. Let's get it out of the way first: why photograph such a transparently banal space so many times? I won't hide behind "because I wanted to", though that's certainly true.
I love endurance photography. I love any photography where the strain of an undertaking almost becomes imbued in the images, whether through an acknowledgment of the construct under which they were made, or in the content of the images themselves. John Divola's As Far As I Could Get is one example of this. The photographer runs away from a self-timer-triggered camera on a tripod as fast as he can, as far as he could get. I was eager for many years to make a series of images with strained repetition and persistent looking. Constraining myself to photographing a single thing a hundred times or more was a project I always wanted to undertake.
I set out one day to start this work, looking for somewhere where I could practically, in public, spend several hours without being bothered. I wanted an object I had access to on all sides, and preferably one with a bit transparency, at a human scale. I wanted to be above and below it, look through it, move all around it. After many hours of looking, I found an empty parking lot in front of a vacant store in Midlothian, Virginia. There was a small shopping cart corral in one end of the parking lot. I barely spotted it from the adjacent six lane road. I had a hunch that I had found my subject.
That hunch bore out over about two months and 840 photographs, but I was willing to be wrong. The fact that it was 840, of all numbers, and a shopping cart corral, of all things, gained enough significance over the following weeks. I will address both in later essays. The associations snowballed to the point of meriting sustained thought and inquiry beyond the act of being in the space and making the photos. This book, and the show that is serves as a complement to (rather than an exact catalog of) are results of that inquiry. What are some other threads that carried the project along?
There is some generational itch in the U.S. landscape photographer, I think, to photograph the built environment, especially the repetitive landscapes of suburban retail. More attention is given to this topic in essay #2. However, it is worth mentioning here first because I sat in the shadow of it for the entire project, and it may be the most on-the-nose visual reference: the abandoned box store, and the empty shopping cart corral. Yes, I will deflate the suspense right now- you can scour all 840 photographs and (to my knowledge, unless it's in the distant background) you will never see a shopping cart in these photos.
Brian Ulrich has produced several bodies of fine photographic work drawing out the tension between the elements that seem to be both alive and dead in the drumbeat of consumerist culture of the United States. In “The Centurion” he examines the mythmaking of what he calls the new gilded age in the United States. He photographs the rich. He documents new American castles and the dizzying colors of the highest-end fashion stores. The lush spaces and portraits of those that are (or yearn to be) youthful allude to the straining towards enduring life through consumption.
Also within his oeuvre is the series "Dark Stores, Ghostboxes, and Dead Malls". He renders the vacant, for lease, or utterly dilapidated malls and retail spaces in a rich and detailed manner, creating aesthetically lavish photographs. The photos are tinged with the nostalgic touches of design which are ten, twenty, or thirty years out of vogue. The photos touch the voyeuristic pleasure nerve often aroused when looking at abandoned spaces. Yet they also pull back the mask of how quickly the thin architecture and glitzy design dies and is transparently dead once the customers go out from it. The spaces rapidly decay, the ornamentation that once gave the space an ersatz life is now a relic after hardly any time has passed.
His photographs, and the photographs of many others that have worked with the failed promises of prosperity in the 90s and early 2000s were in the forefront of my mind as I worked. The glamour drizzled over spaces, decor, and clothing in order to sell comfort, luxury, and style to Americans is a well critiqued concept in American art. Ulrich's work, however, I think gets closer to one of my interests: how does ideology become manifested in constructed spaces? How do human ideologies echo and reverberate off of a natural world? Does the natural world exist only as a mute raw material, or does it speak its own text?
When thinking about the title of this essay, I reached for a phrase which felt intuitive- a marketplace of ideas. I was reacting to the literal marketplace that was in front of me as I worked, and scratching at that idea of how ideas become enshrined in the spaces we build and live in. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the phrase is actually a wedding of free market ideologies and the freedom of speech. These ideas were birthed in the early years of the enlightenment and reached their early adolescence in the American Revolution, especially through the thinking and writing of Thomas Jefferson.
Detail, hanging section. Allows for 96 additional images in the space
The concept grew up in American law and came to mean that ideas ought to be able to compete on an equal basis, as if ideas and beliefs were bought and sold on an open market. Applying the same capitalistic "take it or leave it" principle that allowed certain goods to either thrive or languish, it was assumed that as long as people were free to make their own decisions about ideas, then better and better ideas would be reached over time. The decision was nascent in a ruling on an espionage act in the early 1900s, was clarified in a case regarding advertising and traditional media in the 50s, and the jurisprudence has been carried forward into such decisions as Citizens United vs. FEC, the infamous ruling granting corporations extreme leeway on advertising in elections.
In the United States, companies have become extremely adept at creating convincing arguments, compelling products, and enticing advertisements which vie for the wealth of American citizens in exchange for an immense amount of comfort and ease. It is easy to see this as existing solely within the realm of commerce, yet at the same time, it may be overlooked that these companies are making arguments for our minds and hearts, and with them, our beliefs.
In the wake of COVID-19, I don't know if empty public spaces land in quite the same way that they did when Brian Ulrich was photographing in the late 2000s and throughout the 2010s. When the old spaces were just replaced with newer, shinier, and slightly different spaces, an unlimited future is assumed in the transaction. Today, in 2021 spectacle of public spaces devoid of all human life in an apocalyptic manner seems to have been confined to only the earliest months of the pandemic. We have slowly begun to shuffle back to public spaces and crept back into that long desired time when things get “back to normal”. However, I think the disruption has been sufficient for us to really pause and reflect on the spaces we inhabit, and the ideologies they spring out of.
When I photographed this corral, however, I felt a different kind of isolation. When I set out to find a place where I wouldn't be disturbed, I had no idea how successful I would be. In fact, with 15 trips to the corral and dozens of hours moving within the parking lot and a few adventurous trips across the roads, no one ever talked to me or asked me what I was doing. Sometimes cars would cut through the front of the lot. Sometimes cars would loop around inside the lot to do an easy U turn. Once, someone stopped about thirty feet from the corral, pointed at it (and me), but was perhaps looking at their phone and not at me. Once, a young couple strolled past me while I was on the ground underneath the corral and oblivious because of my earbuds. They passed the strange man doing a strange thing.
It was to my relief- I wasn't eager to try to explain my project to a stranger. Yet, when I'm photographing in public, I almost always get at least one comment. I remember a time I was photographing birds by the river with a long telephoto lens, and a man in a truck asked, "how much did you spend on that?" I said "oh, you know, a couple thousand" (I hate this question!) and got a novel response: "You're a dumbass!"
Other conversations are more mundane or friendly, though. And others still are tinged with the paranoia and hackles-up response that can only come with the knowledge (even subconsciously) that photographs wield power. Especially those taken by bearded men who make suspicious movements on private property. Like I was apparently doing, confronted by three sheriff’s officer squad cars when walking on a public road on the back side of an airport with a camera. They had gotten a call about a suspicious man, but they were nice enough about it. One officer even asked me what kind of camera I was using, and mentioned he liked photographing birds. So do I.
Yet even when using the same long telephoto lens I was called a dumbass for having, and photographing from across the road opposite the corral, no one spoke to me. And those were photographs I was truly nervous to make, worried that I would have to have a similar conversation with new police officers, confronting me on behalf of a concerned citizen in their car, safe and distant from me, yet worrying I was photographing them on their commute home, or on a trip to Wegman's.
My working theory is that my irregular trips to the corral in this utterly mundane space rendered me functionally invisible. It was a new and liberating stance from which to photograph. The solitude found when photographing this non-space, surrounded by people, was almost like the desolation I've experienced in forests without a single person for miles. And, at the corral when that privacy was disrupted, there was an uncanny feeling, almost like the fear I've felt when alone in the middle of nowhere when another traveler crosses my path unexpectedly. My solitude is broken by another, perhaps reaching out for me personally, with unknown intentions.
What did I bring back from the solitude, from the non-space? I'm afraid that if this was just an exercise in self-expression or art for my own sake, I will have wasted my time and the time spent away from my family.
When I was younger, I would spend a lot of time on the internet, wandering around to esoteric corners to find anonymous and fascinating deep dives into things I had never thought to consider, feeling something between wonder and dread. I came up for air in the early social media of 2007, seeing what my friends had posted on their Facebook walls and building imaginary pictures of them. I listened to proto podcasts as early as 2006 and formed my tastes after the opinions of people I never had or never would meet. In 2020 when I began this work, and now into 2021, we have experienced much of what it is like to wander off into the disembodied, speculative, anonymous, and deeply digital. However, having grown up with that space now for 15 years, I fear that there is less wonder there and more paranoia, hatred, fear, and skepticism.
If American culture truly is a marketplace of ideas, it seems hard to argue that social media is the superstore of the 21st century. Except the store comes to us, neatly crafted and slickly packaged with the things it knows we already want to buy.
The internet is not an intrinsically debased place. There is not only untrustworthy, unverifiable, insanity on the internet. But I believe that it has accelerated that gut feeling everyone has that there is sight, and there is seeing. There is knowledge, and there is wisdom. There is information, and there is truth. We are removed from a material reality which can scream or whisper a wonderful order. We look only at snippets on social media, disembodied Discord friendships, fleeting FaceTime family chat, and panic-mongering tirades on Twitter and have gorged ourselves on it in place of real communities, long before Covid. There is a tilt towards foolishness in the pursuit of wisdom.
Unfortunately, we can hardly blame the internet alone, as easy as it feels.
The shopping cart corral is not revelation. The solution is not merely "going outside". Yet, when we think of ourselves shopping at a marketplace of ideas, we end up believing ourselves to be the final arbiter and consumer of truth, picking up and placing one or another discrete belief into our cart, and ignoring those beliefs over there. We might go in and out of this store for sixty years, seventy years, a hundred years. Maybe you only visit the store when things get rough. Maybe you leave the store with a cornucopia of beliefs, packing your car full and abandoning the cart in the lot after exhausting yourself loading the car, trying to ignore the corral.
The problem is that the belief that all beliefs are equal in a marketplace of ideas is a belief in and of itself. The sense that we can objectively evaluate any belief — religious, economic, social, scientific — and make a rational and reasoned determination is a statement of faith first in ourselves. It appeals to a structured, ordered, and knowable universe, but it still presupposes that we can make judgments among equal and competing viewpoints, and that we are the only (or main) meaningful audience for truth.
We may think ourselves as shoppers at a marketplace of ideas, when in reality, are beliefs are already with us. Our beliefs may wreck us or save us. Our beliefs may be backwards and abhorrent to others and agreeable to the people we love. Our beliefs seem to consistently get us into wars. We believe first and rationalize second.
There is not a literal marketplace of ideas, with rational and detached shoppers weighing between the latest theories in Sociology as they would weigh between the newest flavors of Cheerios. There was, however, a shopping cart corral in Midlothian, Virginia. I didn't put it there, but I photographed it. I didn't take it away, but now it's not there anymore. And even though that cart corral is gone like we will all someday be gone, there is still an intensely beautiful world all around it
Essay #2: Prismatic Repetition
"It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."
G.K. Chesteron
Even with the advent of recorded music, music continues to find its meaning in repetition. The listener lets a newfound song they love wash over them repeatedly until it grows stale. They leave it for months or years and find it again, and all the emotional and memory synapses that had not fired since are re-fired. A wave that isn't really nostalgia washes over you- it's the echo of an emotional resonance that only exists because a song was repeated enough times to be a part of you in the first place. A later hearing may be tinged with nostalgia for an earlier time- but it is still a chord being strummed again which was only there to be played due to the establishment through repetition. The recorded song, played once in the past, is the same song being played again.
But what of photography?
Photography seems to reach at nearly opposite impulses. Music exists in the momentary vibration of air rushing to your brain via the ears, which is then gone as quickly as it came and only persists due to the amazing cognitive facilities which can perceive the harmony and rhythm over time. A fixed photographic image is a stark and always-available record of a moment which once was but is never coming back. To be sure, people grope at photography as if they could re-fire the moment again. But there is no re-firing a moment through photography. Time does not flow backwards. A recorded song will be the same song you heard twenty years ago. The photographic print is the same, too, but the moment it depicts is as far removed from the photograph as one end of eternity is from the other.
In other words, people almost never look at photographs, the ink on the page or the pixels on a screen. They look through the photograph to the referent, and the photograph becomes the vehicle for looking. A photograph may be the same, but the thing we try to look through the photograph at is never coming back in exactly the same state as when it was photographed.
This photographic series is not, at the bottom, repetitive. Yes, it is true that I returned 15 times to the same parking lot to create photographs featuring, in some way, the same shopping cart corral. But I was not striving after the mundane experience of creating an identical photograph 840 times. The clear directive I gave myself was to create as original of a photo as possible for each iteration of the set. Baked into those parameters is a structure of repetition, and indeed, some photos end up feeling quite repetitive. Some for lack of creativity, and some to draw out another distinctive by fixing an element like camera position- e.g., the motion of the sun or moon. But throughout the project, the repetition became an avenue for drawing out the distinctiveness of every narrow slice of time and space which the camera carved out.
What happened throughout the course of the project should hardly have been surprising. The outcome is familiar to a designer who works through ideas and variations iteratively, painters who return to the same subject, or musicians who practice the same song repeatedly: you reach new depths of the subject and undertaking by refusing to allow yourself to move on too easily. Perhaps it's an insight too that's too obvious to spend much time on, but if it is, please permit me to indulge in a bit of redundancy: you learn more about something by coming back to it. In this case, though, it was not the corral I learned more about, but everything else beside it.
With one fixed point, one radius from which to orbit and see the immediate vicinity, I was able to see a landscape around that point in a way that I literally would have never been able to see prior to spending scores of hours there.
It's simple geometry- a straight line can be drawn between any two points on a plane. It is simple enough to take a picture of a thing from any given point: camera and subject. But what became far more interesting to me was the joyful coincidence of bringing three or more points together on a line: camera, subject, tree. Camera, subject, bird. Camera, subject, moon. Camera, subject, all of the stars.
The effect of 840 lines drawn from the camera, through some reference to the corral, and on to a third thing was an explosive prism of observation. I stuck the end of my lens against one pole of the corral to photograph something across the street, leaving only a shadow of the corral. I went as far away from the corral as possible while still being able to distinguish part of its metal poles. I sat silently, straining my eyes and ears for the high and distant rumble of a jet, hoping to photograph a plane with reference to a portion of the corral.
One evening when there was a heavy mist in the air and I was photographing with a direct flash, I realized that I was quite literally able to see the air in a way that I had never quite experienced before when photographing. There was another time in a narrow rental window for a 600mm telephoto lens with a 2x extender (which produced a 1200mm effective focal length, which is equivalent to a decent hobby telescope) when I was anxiously watching the weather forecast, desperately hoping to have an opportunity to photograph the moon. I had to restrain myself from taking too many photos of the moon once I finally got a clear sky. It felt like such a rare and wonderful chance to be able to see the moon at dusk, and still photograph the corral. Three points on a line, two only a few feet apart on the surface of this planet and the other a quarter million miles away, bouncing light from the sun which took eight minutes to get to the surface of the moon into the camera lens.
Let me make something quite clear here, though: it was a very boring sort of space. The corollary to sustained and intentional looking (which begets insight) through repetition is passive looking, which begets numbness. The repetitive suburban commercial landscape of the U.S. has been a frequent subject of photographers, precisely because so many really are numb to it, including me. To create aesthetically rich photos of a mundane space is to reawaken the senses to a space that has become unseeable due to familiarity.
The exhibition New Topographics from 1975 - 1976 and the many catalogs and critiques printed since have paid extensive attention and thoroughly examined the architectural landscape of the United States throughout 70s. The show was so seminal to American landscape photograph and has been so thoroughly examined and written about that I have little to add here other than to comment on its study of repetition in the landscape. There was an implicit critique, I think, of the American landscape and consumerist society that had built it up, but there also an attempt to draw some sort of poetic understanding out of it. Stephen Shore's beautiful color photographs render these banal landscapes in stunning photographic beauty. Bernd and Hilla Becher photograph archetypes of industrial structures in terms of a taxonomic study, saying "look, look at what we are building. We are building it again, and again, and again."
It is now 45 years after the show concluded, though. An entire generation of architects, civil engineers, retailers, and others responsible for creating these spaces have had the opportunity to pause and reflect on the insights the photographers in the exhibition were trying to draw out of the text of the landscape through photography. It does not seem like there was any soul searching. In fact, in the age of COVID we are as eager as ever for drive through, curbside pickup, sealed environments within a short drive or uber ride away.
But that doesn't mean that the landscape has been emptied out of all testimony that nature is still beautiful. I have labored under the false pretense that I had to drive farther and farther, find grander visions to create new work which touched on the beauty of the natural world, when all that was really needed was more careful looking and contemplation.
One of my favorite graphic novels is a work titled Here by Richard McGuire. Its setting is fixed in space and completely unstuck in time. In most panels, the view is a simple American living room, page after page. But as the story unfolds, there are panels inset containing imagined scenes from millions of years in the past, or thousands of years in the future. One family's life is traced from the mid 20th century up until the present day (2015, when the book was published). A scene of Benjamin Franklin arguing with his son takes place in a house across the street, and a girl muses two hundred years later that she thinks Franklin once lived in the house across the street "or something".
The book is appealing to anyone like me who has mused what has happened on the soil under one's feet, or what the stretched out an imaginative future that could be seen if only one sat where they were for a hundred years.
I think this photography body was a gesture at an understanding of how even a mundane space might change, and the variegated environmental experiences one can have even in a single, boring, non-space.
But this omnipresent vision could never really be accomplished exhaustively in real life. We do not get the luxury of seeing into the future, nor do we get the ability to see and extract perfectly from the past. We get the linear experience of life with a transitory present in which to consider, to reflect, to see beauty, to act.
Even as I set in front of myself the ludicrous goal of 840 photographs of one space, I had the desire to rush through their making. The first 210 felt fresh and invigorating. The second 210 felt workmanlike: I would go to the space to work and make original looking photos, but there was a task to do, and I went there to do it. The third 210 felt discouraging, interminable. Surely this project must end soon, but making new photographs was difficult, and on occasion I lapsed into rather mundane photography as I attempted to rid myself of a few more pictures.
But the final 210 just felt a little sad. There was a moment when I saw a piece of heavy machinery parked in the lot and felt something like terror, thinking that the whole parking lot would be ripped up before I could finish the project. But it was gone the next day. I took fewer and fewer photos on each trip as it got close to the end. I thought I would never truly photograph in this space again once the project was over, and I was thankful for the time I got to spend there.
I think the last 210 were the most interesting- at peace with the space, familiar and yet still able to see new things every time I went. By the time I finished, I felt like I could have photographed there indefinitely, with the parking lot as a sort of playground and the shopping cart corral a rallying point, the thing which was the impetus for going there in the first place.
Yet, there is a kind of "dark side" if you will, to all of this: obsession. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that a shopping cart corral could become a theology unto itself. The form may be endowed with a peculiar sort of beauty, and the world around it is undoubtedly beautiful, ordered, and endlessly ripe for investigation. But it would be a mistake to expect transcendental values or understanding to come out of the forms alone. To try to spend eternity photographing a shopping cart corral would be madness. There is no cogent worldview to cobbled together out of a shopping cart corral, right?
The four volume book set contains all 840 photographs, six additional photographs which serve as an epilogue to the series, and six additional essays, as follows:
“No Better than Animals” by myself, about how fixation can turn into paranoia and conspiracy
“Astigmatic Omniscience” by myself, about how this fixation and the thought that we can see everything can make us myopic in our broader views.
“Art is Hard Work” by Garreth Blackwell, PhD, on the importance of repetition for understanding challenging artwork
“Please and Thank You” by Samantha Taylor, on the humanizing impact of familiarity
“Skepticism: A Memoir” by Cody Godwin; what are we looking at, and why does it matter?
Epilogue by myself. What happened to the corral after the project?
Each volume is made-to-order, please email me for more details
