Failed Optimism, American Suburbs Today:
A collection of photographs by Blair Butterfield.
Essay by Blair Butterfield 2010 Edited by Rebecca Bligh

The streets are silent, the sidewalks are covered with grass like archeological finds.Cars are parked like armor in front of houses. Anyone who you might encounter outside is guarded with a fierce stare and uneasy suspicion.

The architecture is contrary: with friendly decorative concrete designs, patterns, bright colors, awnings and a backdrop of a surreally blue Florida sky. These are the streets of early suburban neighborhoods across Florida from Jacksonville to Miami. They are a stark contrast between the new bland and faux architecture of today. These homes stand apart like exotic flowers in an urban jungle.

We imagine the first inhabitants of these places:
Dick and Jane seeing Spot run.
Dishwasher day-dreamers.

A generation with complete faith in the system that has led us to the road we are all so desperately trying to diverge from as it crumbles beneath our feet. To untangle the international web that this Western system 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 city. What they were working for 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 in exchange for time. 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, priming them for a life of consuming to achieve illusionary emotional fulfillment and happiness.

Consumption became a lifestyle. Appliances were sold as futuristic and revolutionary, products were consumed as identity markers. Product mythologies entered every home through advertising: TV, radio, print, even the waste from the product 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. Untouched, non-western countries of the world, BE WARNED! In a consumer society enough is never enough. There is a longing for more and better: a need that is never satiated and is pursued at any cost, even the cost of basic civil liberties.

Micro[Pollen]tin: Like bees in a corporate hive, its inhabitants are simply cogs in a Capitalist machine.

Better than suburbia, a corporate town and its own metropolitan:

The idea of suburbia spawned a phenomenon of ideal living propaganda. In reality modern suburbia is simply a way in which corporations house and feed their workers. For example, in the old mining towns of the past, miners would work for room, board and coupons that were only exchangeable in the store which that specific mining company owned and usually that store would charge higher prices than regular retailers. It is less obvious in a modern living situation, this system has evolved and is very successful at attracting people to participate, as seen in "Micropolitans", such as Plano Texas. This little place was nearly a ghost town before ten major American corporations decided to buy it 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 a 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 ideas behind suburbia, the ideas of:
Protecting the things we love,
Nurturing and teaching our future generations and
Connecting with our very own neighbors,
These things have all been negated.

Suburbia was the very utility that enabled citizens to become enslaved by the Capitalist system which has separated community and isolated individuals by creating an overly competitive work force with little human rights and media saturated consumer lifestyles. We live in constant media bubbles, as our sidewalks disappear we begin to only interface with each other via technology. Suburbia is now mass produced across the globe as a means to house workers and to sell a franchised lifestyle that includes: working for money to consume products for their advertised mythologies.

These photographs seek to capture the reminiscence of these homes and ideas. To urge people who may still live in areas that have not yet caught the Western plague, to open their eyes and to recognize the symptoms. Perhaps all of these houses, just like their ancestors, will be replaced with duplexes, tower blocks, paved parking lots or anything that will bring maximum monetary gain for the owners of the land. These houses are a part of our cultural archaeology and provide great insight into our current civilization and perhaps could offer us a perspective from which to look into our future.