Paper:

Consuming the Frame: Photographs of supermarkets critique the consumerism that Pop Art glamorizes

Later twentieth-century creative depictions of American consumer items have been realized through a variety of media and discussed by scholars across a range of disciplines. However, literature has yet to consider how photography of supermarkets captures a unique aspect of this broader arena. In this paper, I examine photographic projects by Andreas Gursky, Paul Reas, and Brian Ulrich to explore how supermarkets—bastions of consumption—are depicted as both an icon of consumerism and a banal aspect of the everyday. Spanning from the 1980s through the early 2000s, these photographs highlight the tensions between abundance and a lack of choice, as well as consumption and fulfillment. By examining a selection of works through the lens of choice theory—rather than as an extension of the established narrative built around Pop Art—I demonstrate how each project contemplates a different aspect of consumerism. In doing so, this paper expands the field by introducing photographic depictions of consumerism into a domain traditionally dominated by paintings and sculptures, focusing on the realistic constraints imposed by consumerism.