Is This Place Great or What, Brian Ulrich’s long-awaited first monograph, presents the photographer’s decade-long exploration of the shifting tectonic plates that make up American consumer society. Ulrich focuses, in part, on photographing the architectural legacies of a retail-driven economy in the midst of collapse—shopping malls on the brink of demolition, empty big box stores, and other retail structures in transition.

In depicting the disintegration of the former economic and social anchors of the American landscape, Ulrich does more than sketch the fraying surfaces of a shopping-obsessed culture. He has also created a series of clear-eyed yet sympathetic portraits—of teenaged shoppers lost in reverie over a new pair of shoes, thrift-store mavens determined to find the best deal possible, and families desperately in search of that perfect purchase. Cinematic and utterly engrossing, these portraits are interspersed among the forlorn landscapes of empty parking lots and foreclosed malls. Tracing a palpable trajectory from irrational exuberance to debt-laden hangover, Ulrich has successfully managed to get under the skin of the current economic crisis, providing a sobering document—both personal as well as sociologically astute—of the American consumer psyche in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Is This Place Great or What will accompany an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Brian Ulrich (born in North Port, New York, 1971) holds an MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. In 2009, he was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Julie Saul, New York; and Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco. In 2006, Aperture published his work as part of MP3: Midwest Photographers Publication Project.

Juliet B. Schor is a professor of sociology at Boston College. Schor’s latest book, Consumerism and Its Discontents, was published in January 2011.