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This is a collaborative project, a photo-essay, documenting the picturesque ideal in the contemporary American suburb: the way in which people's attempt at making a certain kind of landscape for themseleves has ended up destroying the environment they wanted to create. Americans' fetish for the private automobile, and their insistence on highly-organized sites of mass consumption and technology-saturated, mass-produced homes, has removed Americans even further from the pastoral landscape the whole suburban experiment was about in the first place.
These pictures are intentionally framed around the aesthetic of the Hudson River School, American's premier landscape ideal at the moment the suburbs first became important. That movement, like our project, grew up in response to the loss of the pastoral landscape. These photos, like those paintings, contain the inevitable presence of man, as well as elements like framing trees, wide vistas and clouds. The central challenge of this project was photographing areas that many people would think of as 'ugly' in a way that is both beautiful and powerful.
This project involves making fine-art photos in the Bush-era suburbs around the Bible-belt city of Greenvillle, South Carolina. Your support will help cover not only the costs of travel, film and developing but also support the process of turning the project into a self-published and self-promoted photo book. It will help cover a fraction of the cost of editing the book, producing the project, printing the review copies and other promotional materials.
We're hoping this project will be a meaningful, beautiful and relevant look at the way people live and the way people see their space. If the suburbs are a phenomenon under attack from a number of fronts - raising gas prices from declining supply, increasing awareness of the environmental costs of auto travel and mass consumption, and suspicion of the social affects of suburban living - we hope to contribute some small slice of understanding and appreciation.
Even if you can't contribute financially, your help spreading the word about the project - through social media, or your network of connections - would be greatly appreciated.