Suburban Jungle explores the landscape of suburbia as visual metaphor for the psychological state of small-town living. Amidst tidy lawns and neat fences, I photograph the vines, brambles, and branches of the encroaching wilderness. My work takes me throughout the Northeast, into New England towns that become indistinguishable from each other. The surrounding environment is both the lived reality and symbol of the restlessness of suburbia; yards are mowed and gardens trimmed, while everywhere the forest threatens to engulf the stability of house and home. Environmental portraits are coupled with photographs of those borderlands between domestic and wild landscapes in a kind of ethnography of the familiar. I am interested not only in the indeterminate borderlines between the wilderness and developed lands, but in the relation between that distinction and the mental and emotional states of suburban dwellers, who reside between rural and urban spaces. 

The people and places I photograph are not unordinary. They are inhabitants of in-between places. They work hard, build homes, and raise families, according to convention, but do so surrounded by the untamed expanse of woods, lakes, and mountains. Maintenance and upkeep meet with dilapidation and overgrowth in the suburbs, industry with unsatisfied dreams that escape the confines of picket fences. Despite planning and development, the suburbs contain all of the wildness of the natural world and the untamed desires of its inhabitants. Through photography, I examine a way of life that is often considered unworthy of such close scrutiny, too mundane or average to be of artistic interest. My investigation is visual anthropology that reveals both people and place as complex products of the other.