Brian Ulrich  (American, 1971) 

Brian Ulrich (American, b.1971) is a photographer and artist whose work primarily concerns itself with American consumer culture. Ulrich was born in Northport, NY, and obtained his BFA in Photography at the University of Akron. In 2004 he received his MFA, also in Photography, at Columbia College Chicago. While completing an internship at the Akron Art Museum, Ulrich became fascinated by art and social history, as well as the increasing consumerism in the United States after 9/11. He began to work on his primary series of photographs, Copia, in 2001. The series first depicted shoppers and their surroundings in big box retail outlets in a very obvious display of consumerism. After being shown in a variety of galleries across America and overseas, Ulrich decided to divide Copia into more diverse chapters. In addition to the original collection, Retail, Ulrich has more recently documented thrift and discount stores and their shoppers in Thrift, as well as out of business malls and shops in Dark Stores. The series, as a whole, is meant to explore the balance between banality and humanity in these retail environments in a range of social classes.

Ulrich has received a great deal of acclaim for his photographs and has garnered the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for photography in 2009. He published Is This Place Great Or What, a monograph of his decade-long Copia project, in 2011. His work has also appeared in a variety of magazines, and Ulrich is also a regular contributor to the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters.

Ulrich currently lives in Richmond, VA. Over the past number of years, he has turned his attention towards teaching, serving as a professor at Columbia College Chicago and School of the Art Institute of Chicago until 2011. He is currently teaching in the photography and film department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, as well as continuing to produce works for exhibitions and taking Copia on tour to museums across the United States. Ulrich is represented by Julie Saul Gallery in New York, Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, and Gallerie f5,6 in Munich.