About Suburbia: Keeping Up Appearances

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. 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! *Purchase with other books as a bundle and save on postage*

matt laminate cover (300gsm), 40 pages (150gsm), 148x210mm.