Suburbia - Keeping Up Appearances

When people visit a city and tell their friends back home about it they more often than not share stories and experiences that are confined to (insert city here) the central business district or popular precincts very close to it. Rarely does it seem to extend to or encompass the suburbs, the seemingly endless sprawl where most people actually live, and yet it’s somewhere so often perceived as somehow unremittingly uninteresting. 
 
It’s only been in the last couple of years that my focus has shifted to documenting suburban life. It’s always been there as an integral part of my life, having grown up in the suburbs, and in my experience as a photographer. Documenting the built environment has invariably meant taking photos of places and spaces in the suburbs. It’s only in more recent times during the pandemic that I’ve paid closer attention to suburbia as a dedicated project theme. It’s provided me with wonderful opportunities to explore a new project in a time of profound and unnerving uncertainty, providing me with quiet spaces to explore and give free reign to my imagination, redolent of being a child when you have escaped from the gaze of adults and been left to explore and do your own thing. It’s a project that has a spontaneity about it and that is in many ways the opposite of my projects focusing on skyscrapers and the hustle and bustle of the city. The built environment is of course still a central theme but explored within a different context. It represents a deliberate seeking out of those quiet spaces in what is so often a noisy and frenzied world.
 
For this project I enjoyed going through my archives and taking walks and seeing where the next street and laneway would take me, venturing from well-worn thoroughfares to byways, into nooks and crannies. I remember early on in the project finding a myriad of laneways and small spaces adjacent to the backs of houses that serve as kinds of hidden walkways whereby I was captivated by being transported into what felt like another world, into which I could escape and allow my imagination to run wild. Cobbled together tin and timber fencing, vines and random other plants are all vying for light in these tight quarters. It evoked powerful memories and took me back to being a child exploring and being curious as to what’s around the next corner. It never ceases to amaze me how this simultaneous process of exploration and attentive curiosity can steer ideas and projects in completely novel and previously unimagined directions. 
 
I enjoy the heterogeneity of suburbia, and for precisely this reason it’s impossible to definitively capture its essence as there are so many conflicting elements and contradictions that make it what it is. There is simultaneously beauty, ugliness, noise, quietness, the manicured, unkept, abandoned and neglected, modest, pompous and even comedy witnessed by the ubiquitous ‘pick up your dog poo’ signs that range from polite wording to outright suburban warfare!