Stray Shopping Carts #0065

The collector: Julian Montague, Artist/Graphic Designer, Buffalo, New York.

The collection: Documenting stray shopping carts.

The story behind the collection....

There was a specific point in 1999 when I was driving through a busy intersection in Buffalo and I noticed that there were multiple shopping carts on all four corners, many of them tipped over on their sides. It struck me that there was an interesting project to be done about them. At the time I didn’t really consider myself an artist, I was just starting out in graphic design and I was more focused on that world. When I finally started to photograph carts, I quickly realized that were I just to take pictures of them in the urban environment, the work would read as fairly conventional social documentary photography, (a genre I am not too fond of). I thought that to get beyond those conventions I would need to approach the stray shopping cart phenomenon from a different angle. I decided to try to define the different states in which a stray cart could be.  This led to a rudimentary system of classification that described what I then saw as the basic thirteen types. Eventually the system would evolve to include 33 types. My approach was to observe the stray cart in the way that a naturalist might observe an animal. I never posed or repositioned or interfered with stray carts.

Stray Shopping Carts interest me in several different ways. One of the goals of the project is to illuminate the peripheral spaces that stray carts often occupy in the urban environment. I’m fascinated with the way that once you are looking for them, suddenly they appear to be everywhere. People often come back to me after seeing the work and tell me that now they see shopping carts all over the place. Carts are also interesting because I think they are unique as transient urban objects. While there are other common objects that move around the city (plastic bags, traffic cones), carts are different because they are so useful for so many different purposes. People appropriate them and when they are done, they send them on their way to be appropriated by someone else. And that is another interesting element to the stray cart, in many cases you can’t be sure where it is coming from or where it is going next, some of them probably have interesting life stories. 

The documentation started in 1999 and for all intents and purposes ended in 2007. I started the project shooting 35 mm film and switched to digital around 2004. I probably have around 1500 images, documenting hundreds of individual shopping cart specimens.  I haven’t ruled out returning to shooting carts. I recently went to Los Angeles for the first time, when I saw their high levels of stray cart activity I felt a pang of regret that I hadn’t made an effort to get there when I was focused on the project.

What does the collection reveal about me? This is a complicated question. Because of the nature of the project a lot of people think that I must be an obsessive and super organized person, but this is not the case. When I write the text for the shopping cart project I do so in the voice of a character that takes figuring out the stray cart phenomenon very seriously. So in a way I’m playing someone who is obsessed while not feeling particularly obsessed myself. I find it easier to tell you what my project doesn’t say about me than what it does.

My favourite stray cart specimens are those that are, in the language of the project, B/12 Simple Vandalism, B/13 Complex Vandalism and B/21 Naturalization, in other words, carts that have been thrown into bodies of water. While working on the project I was always hoping I would find a cart in a tree. The closest I came was the basket of a cart that had been thrown into some tall bushes.

Links

Julian's website: http://www.montagueprojects.com/

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23473719@N08/

Book: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification