Maria WhitemanPhotographer

Hiking the Suburbs: 2008, Photography (Printed on fine art paper),
Size: 12“h x 14“w each, (20 photographs in the series)

It is more than a mere conceit to conduct a hike through the suburbs and to produce a photo-essay of what one encounters along the way. Hiking the suburbs constitutes a form of artistic and theoretical critique. The object or thrust of this critique is not what one might expect—those damned, blighted suburbs, supposed bane of mankind, in which most North Americans nevertheless choose to live despite the fact that they represent everything that has gone wrong with modernity. The aim of hiking the suburbs isn’t to highlight the ugliness or mass reproduced character of suburbs in comparison to the beauty and unpredictability of the natural settings though which one normally engages in the activity of hiking. Nor is it to draw attention to the phenomenological glories of a walk through urban spaces—the older, the more esteemed—to further highlight everything wrong with the ‘burbs—boredom instead of experience, cars instead of people, the same instead of difference and eclecticism. These gestures are common enough to be characterized as suburban in their own right: familiar, similar, mass produced.

The hike described above traverses a space from a suburb in South Calgary built on the model of a new urbanism (a la Seaside, Florida) through pockets of old industrial lands and First Nations and low-income communities that have been purchased and plundered in order to expand the Stampede Grounds. It the moves through the downtown core and the new suburbs in the city’s northwest, before following the TransCanada highway to Canmore—a route traveled by city dwellers intent on exchanging culture for Nature—and ending at a trail head in the city’s new communities, which seem in style and structure much like the space from which the hike began. This hike enacts three critical maneuvers. First, it attends to and reveals the antinomies in our understanding of the spaces we inhabit and those we don’t, which disable our understanding of how we live in the present and how we might approach the future. Second, it draws the different spaces of contemporary Canadian life into relation with one another, navigating the borders between suburban, urban and ‘natural’ spaces in order to re-cast our sense of each of them, and to see them as interacting, intersecting and less delimited than we might imagine them to be. Third, it locates the function of vision, visuality and aesthetics in demarcating and positioning these spaces in our imagination.

Antinomies.

The tendency, even now, to be able only to think of our spaces as structured by oppositions: urban/suburban, city/country, culture/nature. Discourses and narratives attempting to interrogate these—whether it takes the form of critical theory or public policy—tend to get lost in the necessity to affirm one conceptual pole at the expense of the other: the suburbs are unsustainable, thus we should promote the urban (and think no further about the ecological and social implications of urbanity as well); city life is devastating and alienating, so the country is required to heal anomie and loss of self, or, on the flip-side, the country is sterile and inbred, blunting the race to true self-definition that the urban enables. Can such oppositions ever result in any meaningful knowledge about the spaces we inhabit? Better to grasp the way in which our inhabitation of these antinomies are the product of single system whose violent and contradictory logic is expressed in multiple forms: red-brick urban loft spaces now celebrated for their conviviality were often (always?) spaces of profit and exploitation; nature is the other of human habitation only by a kind of too simple negation that has been critiqued by Slavoj Zizek, Timothy Morton, and others; and the city and country exists in a dialectical and ever shifting relationship in which each requires the other. Suburb-city-suburb-exurb-country-nature-suburb: access to these spaces and their social significance is framed by economic privilege and cultural capital, institutions and discourses of governmental rationality and control (e.g., urban planning, property values, etc.)—in a word, capitalism. In a blunt sense, hiking the suburbs is to pass through the multiple spaces of capitalism and to experience the desires and fantasies as well as the social and economic logics that animate them.

Space.

Physical movement produces relations and connections that concepts and words on a page can run pass or overlook entirely. How we imagine the suburb depends on how we relate to them spatially. A place of home and safety located at a distance from work and crime? A prison-space in which one’s movements are delimited and from which it is hard to escape? Our relation to space reinforces social expectations and typical imaginaries of cities—or undoes them. Our daily lives structure our movements through urban spaces: work and home on weekdays, nature on weekends, zones marked as dangerous and/or aesthetically displeasing avoided altogether. Hiking a vector that cuts through the city from north to south (in a straight line, as much as possible), and which moves beyond to the city’s natural ‘other’ means to experience the full range of spaces (and so, social relations) assembled in the contemporary Canadian city. There’s no reason why Situationist psychogeography can only be practiced in a Romantic tourist town (did Guy Debord and co. ever venture to the banlieues?); indeed, maybe undertaking a similar critical encounter a city whose urbs and suburbs plays a crucial function in the twenty-first century economy and which has been rated highly as an ideal place to live, is likely to generate more knowledge about the mechanics and logics of the contemporary world.

Vision.

The figure of the hiker in these photographs belongs not in the city centre or on the highway, nor occupying the sideway of a suburban street, whether in a mountain town or in the city. His gestures and movements are out out-of-place, as if he were transposed from photos of valley walks in Banff or Jasper into photos by Geoffrey James via the intervention of Photoshop. It is essential to render the suburbs into visual form to highlight the important role played by vision and aesthetic in how we respond to and understand these spaces. Uniformity and repetition are celebrated in (say) the formalism of Donald Judd, or some of Warhol’s pieces, but are one of the main reasons to indict the suburbs. Banality, plainness, lack of colour—categories that should cause us to sit up and take note that attitudes and ideas about the suburbs are infused by the game of cultural capital as much as any aesthetic form. The attribution and patrolling of ‘better’ or ‘worse’ kinds of aesthetic form reinforce much of the moralism about the suburbs: the idea that everyone has an (unlimited) choice in where they live, and the proper aesthetico-ethical act today is to live in the urban centre. Structure and history are thus reduced to matters of individual decisions in a manner that allows those with the means to feel morally comforted about their style de vie, while never taking up the politically and social forms that generate the spaces we inhabit—the spaces and our visual imaginaries concerning them.

Hiking the Suburbs isn’t intended to revalorize the suburbs, to engage in that all-too-easy flip of valences that can sometimes be passed off as an act of criticism. Its aim is to participate in a reinvention of the visual and verbal discourses through which we conceptualize the spaces in which we live in order to lay bare the logics (from the economic to the affective) through which modern urban spaces are shaped and experienced.