This series of images was made in the autumn of 2010. It contains portraits of a young woman set against a suburban landscape in decline, as well as photos of that landscape in isolation from its inhabitants. Together the images explore the complicated relationship between person and place, in which each is formed by and constitutive of the other. The young woman is caught between girlhood and womanhood, between the security that suburbia provides and the gender roles suburbia normalizes. Suburbia, in turn, is affected by her struggle. In the images where the woman is absent, something ‘wrong’ or ‘odd’ or even sinister is often revealed. They feel incomplete, and, in this way, the suburban landscape functions as both backdrop and foil for the character of the young woman.



The landscapes are most-often confronted head-on whereas the woman is seen climbing up or out or moving to escape the frame, though the viewer can be sure she never will. She is impossible to imagine into any other context. She is fighting against a growing awareness that her permanence is equal to that of the identical houses, the bicycles, the daily mail delivery, the dogs on walks. She is suburbia.



In conjunction with making these images, I created a series of poems on the same themes of place, home, escape, claustrophobia and deterioration. Some of these poems have been excerpted among the images to underscore their relevance.



The poems and photos were also made with the same ambition in form--to construct the thickness of a moment, the depth of what happens inside a moment. I was inspired by Iris Young’s classic feminist-thought essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, which describes how women come to occupy their bodies in ways that inhibit movement. Women throw, hit, swing, punch, live like a girl. Suburbia assigns women roles that keep them standing in place at the kitchen sink, sitting modestly with legs crossed, as if they are attempting to twist themselves into something smaller. The images here cannot be understood as representative of a particular historical moment; they take place in a timeless situation of subjugation. They are not intended as autobiography. They are open-ended, and therefore, the experience of viewing them is individual. They relate to the private life of one character and they were staged and made only by myself. These images are personal, in the strictest of senses.