In Suburbia

I’ve called this section “special projects” as it’s my ongoing personal work which looks at my relationship with my immediate surroundings. It started off with me wondering about my local town of Edgware and just observing the everyday idiosyncratic. It’s become somewhat of an obsession to view the strangeness and individualism of how we live in a completely homogeneous society. We value the minutia like the hanging baskets, the paving stones, the garden furniture at the front of the house whilst not accepting that we all live essentially in the same mock tudor houses with plastic bins ruining the posh door numbers that we bought back from our summer holiday.

We all celebrate in the detail and it made me think about my own house, property and home and how I value the detail without acknowledging the fact that being “up with the Jones’s” is a fiction as the “Jones’s” essentially live just like us, albeit maybe without the mediterannean railing on the first floor balcony. I hope you see the humour in these shots; some you have to look quite hard at before you see the absurdity, and some are just studies of suburban England or light joyously dancing around the paving. It creates an image of our community and neighbourhood which is inescapably British. I hope you enjoy them.

Howard Shooter