Through the looking-glass

 

During the first housing boom of the new millennium, Stacy Mehrfar set out to photograph the wave of new suburban developments throughout the continental United States. Conveyed by her impeccable shots it’s easy to focus on the unwieldy presence of the new built environment within a formerly untouched nature, crushed and raped to the point of becoming a parody of itself, emptied of meaning by a patched need of artificial naturalness. This is only the first part, called “American palimpsests”, of a project started in 2003 and then culminating in an excellent publication, after a photographic campaign that has crossed 28 states. “While I continued to photograph the new suburban developments”, Stacy tells about this work, “I began turning my camera onto a second subject: the places beyond the new town lines. I soon realized that what I was fascinated by was not only the effect of suburban sprawl on our natural landscape, but also how the effects of sprawl revealed itself in the rapidly declining older neighborhoods.”

And it is so, then, that takes form “This was what there was” to complete the look on a complex and elusive “middle ground“, a geographical liminal state between old and new, unique and undifferentiated, natural and artificial. The other side of the same coin. “Today we are facing the effects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis”, she concludes. “Many of the new communities I photographed for this project now lie empty, with many developments left incomplete. Every day we hear more about the foreclosure crisis and homes being lost. What we don’t hear about is the irreversible destruction to the natural habitat, a direct result of these construction sites that now lie unfinished. If it is true that history cyclical, then we need to look into our past to restore our immediate future.” 

 

Photo:

© Courtesy of Stacy Arezou Mehrfar

www.stacymehrfar.com

(click on the image at right for more pictures)