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.
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