Failed Optimism, American Suburbs today:
A collection of photographs by Blair Butterfield.
The streets are silent, the sidewalks are covered with grass like archeological finds. Cars are parked like armored machinery in front of the houses. Anyone who you might encounter outside is guarded with a fierce stare and uneasy fear.
The architecture is contrary: with friendly decorative concrete designs, patterns, bright colors, awnings and a backdrop of a surreally blue Florida sky.
We imagine the first inhabitants of these places:
Dick and Jane seeing Spot run. Dishwasher day dreamers.
They were a generation that had complete faith in a system that has lead us to the road we are all so desperately trying to diverge from as it crumbles beneath our feet. To untangle the international web it wove and is still weaving would require the same propaganda techniques employed to deceive us in the beginning.
Post war Men, like the Bowerbird, constructed homes designed to keep their wives and raise their children while they were away working in the inner city. What they were working on, would eventually lead this “nuclear family” to become fractured. With industrialization came mass production and soon mother and wife were separated from the home, as she had graduated in society, and was now deemed: capable of work outside the home.
Appliances, canned food, frozen dinners, baby formula anything that would synthesize in exchange for time, was the new home life. Children raised by others as Mother brought home a second income. Not only did this raise the cost of living as families now had combined incomes, it separated women from the natural bonding that a child needs in the early years of life. Many agree that this creates an imbalance in an individual which primes them for a life of consuming to achieve illusionary emotional fulfillment and happiness.
Consumption became a lifestyle. Appliances were sold as futuristic and revolutionary. It started a phenomena of consuming products as identity. Product mythologies entered every home through advertising: TV, radio, print, even the waste from the product advertises itself as it enters its last stage of life as: trash. Consumer ideology saturates the media across the globe and is devouring our civilization like the plague. In consumer society enough is never enough. There is a longing for more and better: a need that is never satiated.
Micro[Pollen]tin: Like bees in a corporate hive. Better then suburbia, a corporate town and its own metropolitan:
The idea of suburban neighborhoods spawned a phenomena of ideal living propaganda. In reality the idea is simply a ploy for corporations to house and feed their workers. Like the old mining towns of the past. Where miners would work for room, board and coupons that were only exchangeable for goods at company stores, which usually charged higher prices than regular retailers. It is a little less obvious in more modern living situations as seen in micropolitans. For instance, Plano Texas. This little place was nearly a ghost town before ten major American corporations decided to buy it all up and put their corporate headquarters in its center. Outside of its center they have contracted developers to build popular franchised restaurants, a plethora of themed shopping , a cinema and two different lifestyle living situations. One is the popular suburban dream of a house, a yard, a garage and the other is a more city style apartment living just outside of the shopping and eating place. Little do most employees of the corporations know that after they get their salary from Frito-Lay and go spend it at the Plano cinema or Plano grocery store, that they are in fact just returning the money to Frito-Lay or Bank of America. (These names are used for example, but they are in fact a part of this micropolitan of Plano Texas.) It is like herding technique that involves deep rooted psychology of the fragile emotions of the human mind and the disgusting greed of money and ego.
It is ironic that the idea behind suburbia, the ideas of protecting, nurturing and connecting with a community, has become the very utility that has separated community and facilitated an isolated, competitive consumer lifestyle.
These photographs seek to capture the reminisce of these homes and ideas. Perhaps all of these neighborhoods will be replaced with duplexes, tower blocks and paved parking lots. They are apart of or cultural archaeology and provide great insight into our current civilization and perhaps could offer us a perspective to look into our future.
