Dirt Cheap Abundance

Photographs via Flickr by kate*

It’s just about impossible to pick one favorite image from this Flickr set from a store called Hudson’s Dirt Cheap. It’s by Kate “Obsessive Consumption” Bingaman.

It’s particularly interesting as a kind of counterpoint to the photographs that Andreas Gursky took at 99 Cents Only stores: Those have a feeling of spectacular, almost sickening abundance. I’ve seen some of them in person, and the monumental scale adds to the effect. There’s a bit of a different feel to this, but I think you’ll see the connection, and why these work as a counterpoint. I was interested to discover, in the course of trying to remember Gursky’s name, that 99 Cents Only, which is a chain, actually uses one of his images on its home page.