Suburban Dream

Suburban Dream is a series that evolved over many years, and continues to evolve alongside my other series. It reflects my thoughts about a dream space that is separate to the documentary aesthetic and approach from which I began my photographic practice. It would be accurate to say that the more I have practiced photography over the years the more I have continued to divert from a straight documentary approach, such that if I look back at photos from ten or fifteen years ago now it is the outtakes and the rejected images on the periphery that now call my attention, rather than those I originally selected as the most important elements of my edit. I’m interested in peeling back the surface of documentary to get at the fundamental truths at the periphery of all the action. 

Initially the images that drew me for this series might be perceived as mistakes - images in which subjects are out of focus, or with camera and/or subject movement, but which I came to feel reflected this other world that was so hard to locate visually. I’ve been especially drawn to those dark images which reflect the hidden and opaque world of the dream, in which the dreamer is transported from one place to another, and one unlikely scenario to another - transitions and connections which feel so natural and obvious within that world, but which are not so in the light of day. The “unnatural” selection of images reflects the disjunctions of the dream space.

The series is my most diverse in terms of the spread of time over which the images were created (over almost two decades), the places in which they were created (across several countries and continents) and by being a mix of film and digital, taken with a range of cameras. There is never a final edit; every time I revisit this theme I feel compelled to reorder or adjust it in some way.  In many ways this diversity and lack of permanence reflects the dream space itself, which cannot be pinned down with any specificity. In a dream the rules of space and time are not bound with the reality of daily existence. So it is the case with the pairing and editing together of this often diverse set of images. 

But the images are bound together, and reflect many of my ongoing interests. Firstly, the images reflect my interest in the in-between moments of life, rather than moments with all the action. That is, those moments when individuals are alone with their thoughts, or simply alone and daydreaming or drifting off somewhere and which, on the face of it, hold little interest. The action is happening somewhere else and I am peering back-stage. This is the quintessential entry point to the world of the dreamer. 

The series also reflects my interest in water, and in particular immersion as a form of redemption and rebirth. The underwater world is one of another dimension, one which is a constant presence, either in the form of individuals in the water, or beside the water, or at the beach, darting between rocks, or racing towards the sea. The sea is the place of renewal. It is the place of escape from the “real” world. It is a place of redemption, where, stripped of the social trappings of the formal world, individuals cannot stand in judgement, nor must individuals hide in fear from those who stand in judgement.

The series continues my interest in the formative years of childhood, the purity of children prior to their inevitable inculcation into a socially stratified world. Children in this series act as representatives of the purity of the otherworld for which we strive in order to escape from the "real" social world. But they are also those who sing the siren call to join this alternative universe, often shrouded in dark and mystery and for which we can only guess the content, in the same way as we can only guess the intent of the children. Children are at once both the vulnerable and the tempters, seducing the dreamer into darker worlds.

For many individuals in the western world everyday life is dominated by a suburban existence, which is both familiar but characterised by private activities taking place behind closed doors. The dreamer in this context attempts to penetrate the unknown of what happens behind closed suburban doors, while simultaneously attempting to escape the restrictions imposed by the rules of suburbia, hence repeated motifs in the series of cars, windows and city suburban street life. These places are at the same time both familiar and hidden - or, in the world of the dreamer, the conscious and subconscious. 

With Suburban Dream my interest is in the elevation of quotidian moments to the sublime. Certain everyday moments reveal deeper truths about the nature of human emotion and experience. These truths lie just beneath the surface of daily activity and everyday life, waiting to be exposed as one looks askance at each subject anew.