Brian Ulrich: Dark Stores

Richland Mall, 2009; archival pigment print. Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.

Brian Ulrich began photographing abandoned shopping malls, stores, and big box retailers in the wake of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, an uncertain time when the government called on Americans to resume their normal patterns of consumption. Outside of the obvious timeliness of Ulrich’s show and current platitudes about American consumerism, “Dark Stores” is a collection of beautifully uncanny images that ruminate upon the structure and occasional failure of retail architecture.

In his photographs, interiors of abandoned stores sit void of merchandise, with exteriors equally as desolate. Even with a store’s signage removed, the franchises’ identities are still apparent in the ghostly and patinated outlines of absent logos and familiar lettering. Moreover, the homogenous and iconic architecture which brands big box retailers also serves as a conspicuous reminder of their financial failures. In his most successful images, the context is ambiguous—the store could be closed for the day, rather than permanently. While Target (2009), Ulrich’s image of the store’s exterior with a cast-off shopping cart, is perhaps too convenient, he shows sophisticated restraint in Richland Mall, where the building and parking lot stand starkly and quietly amid a snowy landscape. The wholesale abandonment of modern architecture itself is particularly unsettling in these photos, as it disrupts our notions about the very permanence of the form. Operating at their deepest level, Ulrich’s photographs of abandoned retailers are uncanny reminders that within a few short miles, there is probably an identical store teeming with shoppers. 

“Brain Ulrich: Dark Stores” is on view at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco through October 31, 2009