Rudy VanderLans’ Supermarket presents the California landscape as a vacant domain. This photographic collection is more of an environmental documentary than a design novel. You will not be wowed by typographic gestures nor need a double take to absorb the Photoshop trickery and ultra-flat vector-art chaos. But you will slowly turn pages, digesting VanderLans’ chronicles and considering the environment through his eyes.

With the exception of VanderLans’ own voice set in Solex and excerpts from John C. Van Dyke’s The Desert, you will not witness another human being. While VanderLans’ shadow lingers within the frames of his pictures—akin to Friedlander leaving behind his dark silhouettes—the book paints a somber portrait of the writer’s journey. In the desert, I sympathize most with this traveler. We look at Joshua trees and yuka plants that rest motionless. Vacant homes remain from the 20th century’s Homestead Act. All of these images rest frozen so we may consider the author’s journey, and sometimes compare notes across time he’s logged.

Like VanderLans, most designers have a passion for books. The difference is that he’s met the lofty ambition of writing, designing, and publishing head on. Supermarket is not a testament to his work, oeuvre, or aesthetic bias. It’s a testament of his love for books and willingness to manifest his passion. Since 1981, VanderLans has documented the California environment using photography. In Supermarket, he shares what he has seen, inviting the reader to partake of his trek.

What surprised me most was the absence of typography in these photographs. From a man that dedicated time and energy to promoting fresh and exciting typefaces through Emigre, the landscape of Southern California mostly fills the book. Occasionally you’ll catch distressed typography, signs and signposts, or logotypes. When you do, these elements ground the book, even delivering us from the absent and arid desert where the journey began. Amid the organic landscape, lush golf courses, and sporadic cityscapes, Supermarket proves that California contains life. A life that grows green, gets dusty, and shares both space and time with singular spans of concrete known as interstates. VanderLans paints it all using poetic photography, self-conscious documentation, and love for the art of the book.



Book Information
Supermarket by Rudy VanderLans
176 pages, Hardcover, 8 3/4” x 11 3/4” (297 x 225 mm)
250 color illustrations, English
Publisher: Ginko Press
ISBN: 1584230800

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