“So much of the weight of consumer apparatus depends, of course, on the production of desire - on the capacity of companies to generate a sense of lack where previously none was felt. Beyond the more self-evident (and very timely) political critique offered by Brian’s pictures, this idea is central too. His photographs never outwardly seek too earnestly the sheen of something beautiful, but achieve it by a seeming accident or spontaneous sincerity that is always everywhere sensitive to the ethics of the image, and the function of desire in our lives.”

— from a lengthy feature on the decade long study of consumerism and its relations to American culture “Copia” by Brian Ulrich, recently released as the monograph Is This Place Great Or What by Aperture.