A photographic journey behind the opaque storefronts of shuttered retail spaces, and their magical worlds of compositions and modern ruins.
In Capital, Mark Hage reframes the story of gentrification, and in photographic portraits of shuttered retail spaces captures the hidden soul of the city. Exploring the accidental compositions that emerge in the built environment, he invites us to view an alternative to increasingly over-mediated spaces in photographs of what is abandoned, altered, left behind, gutted.
In Capital by Mark Hage, an elegy to a disappearing city becomes an emotional homage to the anonymous labors that built it.
“Each rectangle is its own poem. If I were teaching painting, I would use Capital as a textbook.” —Anne Elliott, author of The Artstars
Hage’s own design sense is exquisite: walls of color or lines or blotches, depths of field extending into unlit edges, snaking wires and interior transom windows, all framed to locate the viewer as the sole observer, the watchperson, watching for the next moves of capital. —Ron Slate, On the Seawall
“Capital’s images capture the vestiges of this neglect with an eye for demolition’s compositional accidents. Hage’s camera zooms in on walls stripped down to scarred and textured abstractions, outlets and wires bereft of purpose, and columns that stand sentry over emptiness.” —Louis Bury, Hyperallergic
As rents and demand, profit and loss, do their dance, hooks and plaster, paint and particleboard register the churn ... Capital is a compendium [of] behind plate glass, and... a city rapidly becoming something else. —Urban Omnibus
In these hybrid spaces, a spirit of labors comes through, anonymous labors that have come and gone, disparate hands that built the years, the same hands that built the city. In these worlds, there is ambiguity and hope, the emotion of aesthetic surprise. —Public Seminar
At first and perhaps out of discomfort, I walked by the shuttered stores thinking of them as surface, without seeking depth or further understanding. But with time, I started to look inside, lingered, and began to photograph for Capital. —Mark Hage, Lit Hub, “The Private Lives of Shuttered Stores”
