Photographing sprawl: picturing the contemporary suburb

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2008 by James Glisson

Robert Altman's Nashville (1975) is a film whose sprawling narrative structure reflects the equally sprawling fabric of the automobile-dominated, postwar boom town in which it takes place. The odd segues with scenes passing like batons from one character to another often depend on the medium of traffic, whether as traffic jams or impromptu roadside meetings. Down to the film's floating camerawork that captures actors from awkward viewpoints, it is a film in which nothing settles and its narrative momentum, like so much rubbernecked traffic, has a stop-and-go quality.

Like Altman's film, contemporary photographers of suburban existence in the United States chronicle dispersed, car-centered boom towns with their strip malls, tacky signage, and acres of parking lots. In taking traffic as a narrative medium, the transportation and growth patterns of a 1970s sun-belt city are shown to circumscribe the relations between the characters. In other words, the dispersed urban fabric of Nashville patterns the human interactions in the film. A filmmaker, Altman pieced together a narrative out of a hodge-podge of characters and plots, but photographers Laura Bennett, Vesna Jovanovic, and Brian Sorg do not. Rather, they probe the types of spaces in suburbia that Altman's wandering camera eschews and our own roving automobile-based gaze is likely to miss. As Americans visit drive-thrus, snag discounted clothing at outlet malls, and purchase particle board furniture, we pass by null spaces: loading docks behind big-box retail, weedy lots in between stores, derelict malls, and office parks of unremitting sameness. What binds the art of these three photographers is their identification of and focus on these null spaces.

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If suburbs are thought of as bedroom communities tightly linked to nearby cities through economic dependence and transportation routes, then Bennett, Jovanovic, and Sorg focus on a type of built environment that is no longer suburban. Instead, growth is now dispersed in all directions of varying densities and uses. Rather than concentric rings of development radiating from a historic core with neat divisions between light industry, heavy industry, and residential zones, the real pattern of development is now a web with a multiplicity of nodes that form around expressway exits, malls, or corporate headquarters. (1) For instance, the Atlanta region covers a large portion of north Georgia, and there is the band of development in Florida from West Palm Beach through Miami to Homestead, a distance of over a hundred miles, squeezed between the Atlantic Ocean and the Everglades. The uninterrupted development from Northern Virginia to Boston is yet another example. While ostensibly connected to a historic urban core, places like Schomberg, Illinois; Tysons Corner, Virginia; King of Prussia, Pennsylvania; or Anaheim, California, are not economically tied to their respective anchors of Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles (itself lacking a "core" to attach to anyway). The South Coast Plaza mega-mall in Orange County, California, a city unto itself, claims to do more business than all of downtown San Francisco. (2) The new suburb is not ancillary to a city: it is far larger in population, economic power, and land area. The German urban theorist Thomas Sieverts calls the contemporary suburb the Zwischenstadt (literally, "between city"); he defines it as neither urban nor rural, and he finds it uncatagorizable according to conventional definitions that focus on density and centrality. (3) The Zwischenstadt is varied but remarkably consistent in its variations. Joel Garreau dubbed these new suburbs "edge cities." (4) In common parlance, it is sprawl.

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The concept of the suburb is not uniquely American or Canadian. The banlieues (suburbs) of Paris have a larger population, more jobs, and greater population growth rate than central Paris, whose population peaked in 1921. In fact, central Paris contains less than a quarter of Parisians, most of whom instead live in the suburbs. (5) Given too that most commutes are within the suburbs, the understanding of the suburb as a subsidiary of a city no longer makes sense: there is no longer an "urb" that the suburb is subordinate to. Calling these photographs "suburban" conjures a vision of twentieth-century Levittowns and postwar sitcom suburbs when, in fact, these photographs are concerned with a much more recent past. Despite the non-specific nature of the term "suburb," this essay uses it as shorthand for the Zwischenstadt, the edge city, or the catch-all moniker of sprawl. Though methodologically light years apart from urban theorists and historians of the suburb, these photographs nonetheless contribute to these writers' efforts to understand the complexity and variety of the contemporary suburb by attending to aspects and pockets that are normally brushed aside or skipped over.

Sorg's series "Closer" (2004-2005) consists of forty-two photographs in total. It illustrates the parsimonious architectural vocabulary and visual monotony typical of low cost commercial and industrial structures found in office and industrial parks throughout the United States. The framing excludes corners, roofs, entrances, and any information that might provide a clue about location. Elements repeat across the photographs, like the sky, bricks, plants, or horizontal strips of reflective glass windows. Their placement is an irregular pattern, not a lockstep algorithm. Surveying the series, the particularities of each building start to rhyme, so to speak, in terms of the absence or presence of diagonals, sidewalks, brickwork, fenestration, floodlights, etc. Finally, the playing-card flatness, as if these are two-dimensional stage sets propped up by unseen two-by-fours and ballasted with sandbags, turns the facade into puzzle pieces to be endlessly cut and pasted, unfixed, and reaffixed to the stable rectangular field of the photograph.