Snapshots from Suburbia: Images from the Underbelly





This one simply called, "Soccer," is a tale of a mother who has taken too many pictures, attended too many practices, made too much small talk. The introverted mother cannot understand why five-year-olds need so many stations and why for the love of Jesus and all the saints in Heaven, the practice ran for 1 hour and 45 minutes, when it should have been 45 minutes. The kids are hungry and cold. The grass, burnt and yellowing from a lack of care and water, seems a metaphor for the mother, and for all mothers and fathers. And parenting is hard and soccer is stupid.



This artistic photograph, an homage to Vermeer, is called, "Scattered Laundry in Early Morning Sunlight." Notice the sense of urgency in the way in which the clothes are thrown about. Was it a mother searching for a matching sock before school? A child who carelessly knocked over the pile on the way to the bathroom for a morning viewing of Caillou, the whiny, bald-child from Canada with an unusual attachment to his mother? Or the father hoping to find underwear so he doesn't have to stop and pick up more during his already brief lunch break? No matter, the beautiful light makes one forget the domestic drudgery of laundry, the most vile of all household chores. 


"Raisin Bran Without Raisins," is an aerial photo that perfectly captures the eating habits of toddlers. Give them a food and they will pick only the parts they enjoy and leave the rest. The sugary raisins will be plucked out with fervor, while the bastard bran will be left to either be tossed into the trash or eaten by a mother who will make excuses saying, "the fiber is good," for her while simultaneously swearing to never let the toddler eat Raisin Bran again. Two days later the exact photo will be taken, the only difference--the green bowl will be replaced with an orange one, because the toddler, "now hates green because it reminds him of Oscar the Grouch, who is really just mean." 


This image, "Wood Chips are Merely Suburban Cockroaches," captures the vastness of suburbia, the endless expanse of the mundane, and the mass of wood chips that now make up modern-day playgrounds. Years ago, kids played on pressure-treated, carcinogen-causing wood. They got splinters and when they fell off the monkey bars, they smacked their little bodies against hard concrete. Some got stitches, some wear their scars even into adulthood.  Note the little boy in this picture, he runs fast and without worry, secure in the fact that if he falls, he will fall into the cushy bossom of a wood chip pile. 

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