Is This Place Great or What
A photobook and exhibition catalogue that gathers the whole of Brian Ulrich's Copia, ten years of photographs of American consumer culture made between 2001 and 2011.
Copublished by Aperture and the Cleveland Museum of Art, the book accompanied the museum's exhibition Copia: Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores, 2001-11, which ran from 27 August 2011 to 26 February 2012. It follows the series in three parts: Retail (2001-06), with shoppers in malls and big-box stores; Thrift (2005-08), with the workers who handle discarded goods; and Dark Stores (2008-11), with abandoned buildings and empty parking lots after the 2008 financial crisis. It includes a statement by the artist and an essay by the sociologist Juliet B. Schor, author of The Overspent American. The volume is a 144-page hardcover.
Ulrich (b. 1971, Northport, New York) studied at the University of Akron and Columbia College Chicago and teaches photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. Closeout: Retail Relics and Ephemera (Anderson Gallery, 2013) is a later publication.
