Asa Nisi Masa by Blake Andrews
Let’s explore the word Suburban,
I was a little uncomfortable about typecasting Blake Andrews’ work as ‘suburban.’ I am possibly one of the world’s least qualified to understand true suburbia, and it’s a word I throw around because I can’t find a better one. I have a similar relationship with the word Street.
In asking Blake about it, he wrote:
“I’m not sure if the word ‘suburbia’ is accurate to describe my work. Many of the photos in Asa Nisi Masa are from Portland and other cities. And Eugene doesn’t feel very suburban, at least the parts of it where I live and typically shoot. More like a mid-size city with alleys and graffiti and grime. But maybe it is suburban in relation to NYC, which tends to impose its own scale on other places? But anyway, I usually find suburbs pretty boring too, and hard to make good photos there…”
“I think this difficulty in defining suburbia might offer a clue about my pictures and my photo instincts. I generally find suburbs too predictable to simulate picturemaking. The things that tend to grab my interest and make me shoot photos are the ‘mistakes’ in the social landscape.”
I replied:
“That’s super funny and very true about the suburbia label. As you said, I consider 1-2 stops further from me in the subway in Brooklyn to be suburbia-ish. I’ll need to think up a better umbrella term to use. I definitely meant the less populated non-ducks-in-a-barrel city traditional type street photography. Which translates well to all the people who live in suburbia or close to quieter / smaller cities, who despair that nothing is as ‘interesting’ as NYC… The grass is always greener.”
I recall in college, how my McFarland, Wisconsin friends used to love to make fun of my city traits. (McFarland is a suburb outside of Madison, Wisconsin).
How I’d walk diagonally across the street, stare dumbfounded at the cornfield view from a friend’s parents’ kitchen window, and how they were always in disbelief that I didn’t have my license—or care. Or, god forbid, when I once referred to an unkempt backyard as a field.
I recall driving (or, in my case, passengering) from Wisconsin to NYC with four friends in a big SUV, observing people get skinnier and skinnier at every gas station on the way east. The tables eventually turned on my cornfed German-heighted friends when we got to the city, wide-eyed as we watched two people get out of their cars and fistfight on the West Side Highway, right in front of us; we hadn’t even made it into Manhattan yet. ‘This doesn’t usually happen,’ I say.
We drive down Broadway through wall-to-wall traffic in Times Square, because of course I’m a 22-year-old Manhattanite and have no idea how to use the highways. They are excited to see the Ghostbusters library. They don’t know what hummus is. As we get to the East Village, we pass by the Cube at Astor Place and notice a woman with her top half up, a man making out with her breast. ‘This doesn’t usually happen,’ I say.
Not to be mistaken with the SoHo Suburbans.
I don’t know how to describe it with a better phrase, but to boil down what suburbia is in my mind. It’s any place with mostly single-family homes or where you need a car to survive. Or that didn’t have hummus in the early 2000s.
How would Hunter Thompson describe it? A stillness in the air, a lack of ambient static, accidental run-ins, micro-interactions, happenstance surprises. Eyes from the windows and not in the streets, as Jane Jacobs coined.
Usually if I take the subway into Manhattan, I take a small camera and capture candids, with occasional portraits. I try to remind myself to notice the backgrounds and details and portrait opportunities—to not be fully distracted by all the fancy people rushing by.
When I take the subway outwards, I typically bring a bigger medium-format camera. I lead by asking for portraits, and I try to remind myself to capture a few candids. A larger camera helps me look like a photographer and not someone sneaking around, and the medium format works well when focusing more on backgrounds, details, textures, and portraying subtle colors.
Blake’s book inspired me to go for a walk.
In addition to Blake, I often recommend John Gossage, Mimi Plumb, and Gregory Halpern for inspiration in these areas, but of course, there are a million others. I’ll make a list for a future column.
I grew up with the work of Alec Soth, which is a funny way to say it because he’s not much older. Minnesotan, an incredible writer and educator. I like photographers who write or integrate writing into their work. And I believe that one of the most insulting and untrue phrases in American discourse is that those who can’t do, teach. That philosophy is what got us into our current predicament.
I’ve mentioned before that in retrospect, my father was somewhat on the spectrum, so sharing emotions wasn’t something he excelled at. So I admired and connected with Soth’s ability to use photography, writing, and teaching to express himself.
To simplify, Alec began his photobook career traveling the Mississippi, youthfully exploring both himself and middle America. There is a loneliness and solitude throughout, but the book lies between hope and darkness. Always a stone’s throw from the water, the book is also always a stone’s throw from the American Dream. It’s omnipresent in the background, yet not quite there.
His followup explored forlorn Niagara, with a heart-wrenching ending of stories and love letters. I was hooked with how quiet the book was until you got to the end, and the words in the letters and stories jumped off the page.
Yet the book which really made me connect with Soth’s mentality was Broken Manual, made to look like a survivalist guide hidden inside a larger book, exploring the lives of people who have escaped a traditional life. At the height of Soth’s breakthrough, at a pivotal moment, and he wanted to escape. Witnessing him explore these urges, I think, helped me notice them in myself. For me, escape was about survival, and I felt the same of his subjects. Now I just need to find a part-time cave somewhere.
I recall learning about Soth’s slow process with people. It was the complete opposite of my nervous, often insane swirls of anxious rambling energy. But I think, in a similar vein, back to when I was doing weekly portraits and interviews of strangers in the East Village as a way to connect with my family history. Except in my case, my meticulousness was with the interviews, while taking a few relaxed simple portraits during that process.
I’m going to end this by talking about something I’ve been seeing everywhere online. And we’ll talk about Mamdani and some NYC politics in the New Year, as I don’t want to burn you all out. I’m a fan, if it’s not clear, but I realize a lot of people are worried about him for a variety of reasons.
Which brings me to something I’ve been thinking about lately, related to loneliness, masculinity, and how we talk about these issues in public. Throughout the news this year, there has been the idea shared that ‘men are lonely,’ and that lonely alt-right men swung the 2024 election.
For instance, businessman and amateur sociologist Scott Galloway has been doing a media tour promoting his new book about masculinity. His videos always have fascinating statistics, but philosophically, I think this premise frames the question all wrong. It is not a problem of masculinity.
Women are lonely as well (although they seem to be handling that much better at the moment than men). And yes, the stratospherically wealthy used the unregulated social platforms and algorithms to target men to make them even lonelier and angrier. But this can’t be framed as just a male problem because the only just-male solutions out there are Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan.
Campbell Soup executive called its products food for “poor people,” lawsuit claims.
Keep in mind that the popular statistic that women speak more than men isn’t true (just ask any woman in corporate America). These widely cited numbers are made up, such as women speaking 20,000 words a day versus 7,000 for men, tracing back to Christian marriage books. It is extraordinarily difficult to differentiate between what is innate, what is perceived, and what has been learned from a millennia of social conditioning.
Everyone can claim their group has the most important problem, and that it’s the other groups that are too reactionary. But the reactionary feelings have been baked into all of us. Even just the idea of polarization can be propagandized for political purposes, as the “‘polarisation narrative’ simplifies complex issues through a bad analogy: the construction of a spectrum where good should be found in the middle of diametrically opposed political positions.”
Anyway, enough politics and amateur sociology for now. Let’s all escape and go for a walk around the block…
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Suberia, for some James is a plant. Don’t spin off in word usage. Great that it’s considered.
Thanks Leo—this is of course semantic stuff, but because I teach and write, often to beginners and intermediates, the communication of the words, ideas, and perspectives has been really fascinating to me. And it’s helped me understand where I come from and my biases and beliefs coming from the city as well. It’s a fun conversation, but yeah it’s all just photography.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that lonely women are not dealing well, with the sort of harassment, stalking, catfishing, etc., that I’ve experienced since the onset of the pandemic.
Hey Arthur, so sorry you’ve had to deal with all of that! The world is crazy right now. And I didn’t mean to make it seem like men don’t have their own societal problems that need to be addressed, learned from, and figured out, in a similar way to how we speak about women’s problems. It’s just that for something like this loneliness issue, my belief is that the male perspective has been hijacking the debate in a way that inordinately places their issues on outside forces over self-reflection, and their role in causing their problems. Those outside forces are certainly there, but I don’t think they can heal, improve, and find the correct solutions without understanding this role that they’ve played in their problems.
An absolutey superb piece once again – read it twice and checked the links
Many thanks James
Thanks so much Chris!
I will add to the accolades — a particularly excellent piece. I live in “suberbia.” I live close enough to NYC to visit several times a year, and find photography there, well, so much easier. I suppose that, from an intellectual perspective, “easy” isn’t the right word; maybe it seems so easy there because it is just so busy, full, frantic, and different. Thank you for turning me on to Blake Andrew’s work — it gives me hope.
Appreciate that Reed! Yeah, NYC is incredible to photograph, but I hope this pushes you to explore more closer to where you are. It’s a very fun game to try to find photographs that interest you in more traditionally ‘boring’ areas, so I hope you give it a go more often!
I too, have struggled with what exactly is “suburbia”. I am a native of SoCal, and, instead of cars, I think of the sidewalks and if there’s anyone on them as a measure. The more people out and walking the more urban a place is. SoCal is definitely Suburbia. All of it! There’s a tiny downtown in LA, but then the homes and parking lots stretch all the way down to San Diego. Maybe Suburbia is relative? Maybe the population density per square mile is a good indicator? It doesn’t matter really, but when speaking photographically, subjects differ significantly from my subdivision street in Anaheim to any street in Midtown.
As for the state of the world, and men and women, oof. We are living in the upside down. Are there more problems or just more outlets to let the world know about our problems? Are we all just reacting to information overload? I remember a time of much less stress, worry, fear – and it’s pre internet. I was also younger and dumber then. Are people lonely? Probably. Words on a screen are no substitute for genuine human interaction. But on the other hand, isn’t it absolutely remarkable that you can photograph and write from New York, and I can read and interact with you from California? Is that not genuine? Would sitting in Bryant Park and chatting over a cup of coffee be significantly different? I think so.
Add to the mix the current political climate and I’m going to say the root cause of polarization is fear. And you’re right. It’s baked into us. It’s a marketing strategy. A political strategy. We’ve been conditioned to fear everything, because there’s something we can buy to fix it, and there’s someone we can vote for who will fix it Men fear women, women fear men, we fear for our children, red fears blue, blue fears red, and too many of us spend too much time in online echo chambers instead of actually getting to know each other.
Thank you for an excellent and very thoughtful essay.
Appreciate these great thoughts Denice. A lot of insight here to think about, everyone fearing and dehumanizing each other. And regarding the suburia thoughts. On one hand of course this is semantic, but I think the conversation can help us figure out how we want to depict these environments.