MON. thru FRI. 8 to 5

The free market system drives our tastes and desires in ways that are less than rational and produces spaces for commerce. These commercial spaces embody the essence of the free market system and show evidence of the market’s invisible hand at work. This beyond-human force shapes the spaces we inhabit and orders our daily lives. In my series, MON. thru FRI. 8 to 5, I photograph six miles of a boulevard where a street functions as a commercial space. These streets with wide lanes, sprawling parking lots, and low buildings suggest a pervasive force is at work in every city.

The types of places I photograph in MON. thru FRI. 8 to 5 exist in every city. They are the kind of places you don’t pay attention to while driving through them to somewhere else. If you turn your head and notice your surroundings, distractions such as billboards, neon signs, store window displays, and sandwich boards compete for your attention. These causal spaces remind me of an equally causal description that John le Carre once used in a novel to describe a building: “Modern nowhere.”

The photographs in the book are sequenced according to their geographic location as if you are traveling from east to west. This sequencing is intended to re-create this commercial space. The photographs were taken after the normal business hours of the work week (another space shaped by the market). The images are void of people to allow the viewer to confront the places depicted.