The New Default

During the 20th century the default landscape of images was mountains, rivers, skies and fields. But what is it now? In the globalized developed world we live in a landscape dominated by concrete and steel, as sculpted by our ever-growing manufactured needs to consume through the later part of the last century. Our world is marked by expansion, development and sprawl. Over the last several decades, our thirst to sell and to buy has lead the way for massive complexes based on consuming to be constructed. They are totemic in nature, temples to and of stuff and things we have told our selves we need, houses we built to put all the things in until they become owned. As we move into the 21st century, we are becoming more connected, not to each other, but to the media based Internet that has allowed consumption to happen instantly through online shopping. More and more, we venture out less to do our buying, preferring to spend from the safety of our own homes. Slowly, these concrete temples are becoming less used, but no less ever-present. Our consuming still creates the exponential need to continue to consume, and we use more space to house these items of value, that in turn cause the need for more consumption. Despite our new outlooks on the world, and our new ways of acquiring in recent decades, we still flourish in a world that is artificial. After so many years of this behavior being routine, is this the common landscape now? With these images, the world as sculpted by consuming, and the living wasteland that is now the default of normal in the globalized world, is created out of the malls and superstores that can literally be found anywhere in the world. All individual identifying details are removed so that the monolithic nature of these places can be constructed in the final photographs. Parking lots and garages, massive chain stores and warehouses of goods are broken down into form to represent that nature of the structure and the shape of the consumer landscape in our connected but disconnected world. The resultant photographs are fiction, but the unrelenting presence of them in our every day is not.