"Curb Appeal"
The Marketing of Sprawl
Artist Statement
This body of work invites
the viewer to take a fresh look at the marketing of the
sprawling suburban frontier and its consequences. Many "new
neighborhood" advertising campaigns entice us to move
beyond the previous boundaries of our metropolitan areas to
escape big city problems. The paradise we flee to however,
is being consumed by this process.
My images use the visual language of marketing to subvert
the advertiser's message. Radical underexposure and
over-development of my film produces a hyper-saturated,
too-good-to-be-true palette. I print the resulting
negatives on a traditional enlarger to a scale which
suggests miniature billboards. In contrast, the subjects
are aspects of subdivision building which we are not
usually shown. What is revealed is the process of nature's
destruction and mass-produced construction that defines the
new landscape.
While this series could have been photographed around many
American cities, these examples are from Atlanta, Georgia,
where I have lived for about eight years. In 1998 the
Sierra Club ranked the twenty most "sprawl threatened"
large cities in the United States. Atlanta was at the top
of the list. Having witnessed the pace and effects of
rampant growth firsthand, my goal is to compel the viewer
to re-examine the "new community" product and the way it is
sold to us.
Sam Hill