The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America by Julian Montague

The system evolved to include thirty-three types that can be used singly or in combination to describe and thereby “identify” any found cart.Īlthough it was not clear to me in the early stages, I soon realized that the project was exploration of the ways in which language and scientific systems of classification shape our perception of both the natural and man made worlds. Over the active years of the project I documented and categorized thousands of stray shopping carts in the United States and abroad. That character (the fictional Julian Montague) became more important as the project proceeded, and the conceptual space of the work became strictly defined.Īs the project moved forward and I was given opportunities to show it, I was continually refining the system based on new observations. I wrote the text from the point of view of someone who took the taxonomic investigation of stray shopping carts extremely seriously. I thought of the human actors as unseen natural forces (people almost never appear directly in any of the project photographs). I never posed or repositioned or interfered with stray carts. My approach was to observe the stray cart in the way that a naturalist might observe an animal. This led to a rudimentary system of classification that described what I then saw as the basic thirteen types.

I decided to try to define the different states in which a stray cart could be. I thought that to get beyond those conventions I would need to approach the stray shopping cart phenomenon from a different angle. I knew from the beginning that if I were to just take pictures of carts in the urban environment, the work would read as fairly conventional social documentary photography, (a genre I am not terribly fond of). At some point in 1999 it struck me that there was an interesting art project to be done about the stray shopping carts I was seeing around my city.

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America by Julian Montague