Retail

One night In 2000, I was out photographing in New Haven, when I noticed the reflection of a Shell Oil sign in the window of a house.

This swirling, distorted reflection from an adjacent multinational corporation housed all of my deep ambiguity toward the flux of the American landscape. All art finds ways to both celebrate and criticize the culture it comes from, and these windows, while suffused with the generic, invasive glare of global capital, were undoubtedly the most beautiful things I’d ever photographed; glowing like stained-glass windows or the illuminated capitals in medieval manuscripts. For two years, I looked for the places in this country where the zoning doesn’t distinguish between residential and commercial. It was the most difficult collection of images I’ve ever made, as these reflections were only visible from one very particular vantage point, often from camera positions that were impossible to physically hold. The photographs have been exhibited all over the world, initially at Whitecube Gallery in London, as well as at the Tate Modern and at Brent Sikkema Gallery in New York and are in the collections of many museums.