David Brown

An intrepid chronicler of shopping malls and downtown intersections, David Brown's lens is keenly attuned to the distractions of our post-industrial economy. His interest stems from a long lineage of artists and thinkers who also used the shopping mall or store as a subject in their work, such as the 19th-century photographer Eugene Atget, who shot Parisian shopping arcade windows, and the contemporary conceptual artist Dan Graham, who makes video pieces out of surveillance footage of consumers as they shop. Brown's single-exposure photographs of store window displays and city intersections freeze urban chaos into sublime still lifes.