Well before the current fascination with retail “ruin porn” there was a period of naive expansion in the late 80’s and 90’s in Canada. Robert Adams had seen it in the 70’s in Denver, in his book What We Bought, The New World, as he chronicled the unrolling of the new suburban carpet across the great plains.
I became sensitive to it growing up in a Toronto suburb that is now an ex-urb. It became the subject of my first extended photographic project around the time I got serious about photography, 1992. These pictures span the period 1992-2006, and are a mix of kitsch, roadside vernacular and straight documentary. I could tell you that the locations vary from Toronto to Vancouver, Atlanta, New York and New Jersey but it doesn't matter since we have made them all interchangeable in our desire to have a repeatable experience.
All photographs pass into history in a way that encourages nostalgia and kitsch. Nostalgia blunts irony however, which lives to criticize. It was clear at the time these photographs were made that this form of relentlessly expanding capitalism was unsustainable. I don’t think we have realized it yet.

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