Photographing sprawl: picturing the contemporary suburb.

Just as the series schematizes the buildings' architectural components, so too is the natural in the form of sky and grass. A slender rectangle of grass in one photograph is cement in another; a block of sky morphs into aluminum siding. The natural is just another element in the permutations of structures that these photographs explore. The sky can be kept or taken away--it is just as manageable as the man-made elements. Such is Sorg's serialization. To have placed these structures amidst a mountain landscape, next to agricultural land, or under a vast dome of sky would have pastoralized them, making them minute against the immensity of the earth and mitigating the hard reality of environmental impact. As John Barrell and Alan Wallach have shown, the pastoral in painting and literature operates in a tightly woven dialectic with human interventions on one side and a mythical, pre-human nature on the other. (6) Raymond Williams goes farther to argue that there is no "nature" because there is no landscape and nothing natural prior to human apprehension of it. (7) For humans, there is no nature in itself because we can only process it through preexisting cultural and linguistic forms. To suggest otherwise would be to obfuscate and shrug off responsibility: the landscape is the product of human actions and, as such, can be changed.

While Sorg deploys seriality, it is not of the Minimalist variety. Take, for example, Dan Graham's Homes for America (1969), a project realized as a two-page spread in Arts Magazine. Benjamin Buchloh places Homes at the intersection of minimalist concerns about seriality and the need to up-end the too easily commodified, unique, crafted object a la Donald Judd. Realization in a magazine article meant it existed only as a reproduction, therefore it is not unique, and the two-page spread layout was not a craft. (8) As Buchloh argues, Graham delineated suburban housing patterns right down to their absurdly bucolic names. He simultaneously pokes fun at the pretense of real estate marketing and its paltry smorgasbord of choices and exposes the pseudo-rationality of a serial system.

Sorg's work adopts a mode closer to that of Bernd and Hilla Becher and Ed Ruscha's photobooks of gas stations, pools, and the Sunset Strip. The only determined aspect of their photographic projects and Sorg's is the selection of subject matter and a generally consistent photographic format, with the subject centered--the photographic composition straightforward and not the least bit artful. Without describing every possible instantiation, it is not the closed system of a Minimalist artist like Sol LeWitt in, say, Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974). It is a field of oppositions: the various factors (drainpipe, sidewalk, shrubs, floodlights, windows, sky, grass, and so on) can be laid out in a grid of sorts that would predict all the variation of these metal framed sheds. This is a series but not a sequence: the order of the photographs cannot be predicted. Within the limits of the field, the series could go much further than its current forty-two images. With one building succeeding another without surprise or punctuation and without closure or finality, it is limited but not in linear sense: it is not from A to B and back again, but a modulated continuous loop.

Jovanovic's photograph Twlight (2003) contains a blank, white billboard; a few orange sodium vapor lights; a square non-descript building that could be a factory, self-storage facility, or the back of a retail store; and an aureole of early evening light that erodes the contours of the building, billboard, and power lines. There may be a road to the right, following the power lines. There are numerous indicators of decay: the reflection of the street lamps--warm and orange to the left and growing cooler to the right--reflects off the cracked surface of the cement. The blank billboard advertises nothing, but it is still illuminated, calling attention to its availability, a wordless "For Rent" sign. The very title of the photograph, too, suggests a time of day and a state of disrepair and decrepitude.

The fuzzy, emotive focus and the richly modulated light might make the image nostalgic were it not for the gargantuan empty billboard that hovers, blimp-like, in the middle of the photograph. In contrast with the muted, warm tones of the evening sky, searing artificial light sets off the billboard. Jolting the otherwise bucolic photograph of a parking lot, the stadium spotlights do not blend into the evening glow. A looming square whose size and prominence is multiplied by the worm's-eye perspective of the camera, the billboard is an anti-monument to the transience of the now vacant, purely functional, profit-generating commercial space. These photographs chronicle an essential part of real estate development. In the same way that slagheaps and fouled wells are the by-product of a mining operation, badly maintained, abandoned properties are the outcome of real estate operations.

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In other photographs, Jovanovic also focuses on the residual interstices of suburban development: the derelict space behind shopping centers, the unkempt exteriors of non-descript commercial space whose purpose could be anything from manufacturing to self-storage units. Buildings require service spaces for circulation, storage, sewage, and so forth. The guts of the building are not on display: retention ponds for rain runoff, stripes of brushy land in the narrow spaces required by zoning codes for building setbacks, loading docks, alleys with garbage dumpsters, and parking lots for employee cars.

In Shopping Cart (2003), Jovanovic evokes the back alley or the unused side exit, the perspective from which the big box store is not meant to be seen. In the absence of other features, the anthropomorphized red shopping carts stand in for missing shoppers emphasizing the absence of people. Like the billboard in the previous photograph, the shopping carts call attention to disuse, to a sense of abandonment, as if this were a suburban ruin. Unlike the remains of ancient civilizations in Rome or Central America, it is not exactly romantic much less picturesque, even as the pinhole technique lends it a softened, aged air. Indeed, gaudy red shopping carts, perhaps from a Target store, are awkward signifiers for something so profound as absence. Like Twilight, the uneven tone that might be mistakenly taken for an oversight acts as self-critical gesture, leveraging facets of the photograph against itself, keeping it from falling into sentimentality.

At first glance Bennett's photographs from the series "Remnants" (2007) of raw, scarred land with massive piles of rubble, yellow construction equipment, and silty retention ponds might appear far from human habitation. Castlemore Gardens and Harvest Hills are titled after the subdivisions pictured in them. However, half-hidden by the piles and weeds, there are clusters of single-family homes whose large windows look out onto the construction equipment and dark, toxic-looking, water-filled pits. Instead of agricultural land laying fallow as part of the rotation of crops or a field left to return to bushy grass, this land is on the threshold of development, suitable as the site for compressed rows of three-bedroom-two-bath balloon frame homes, or, if the market is soft, left unmolested until interest rates fall and demand increases. It is not even a non-place, to use Marc Auge's term, for places like parking garages, airports, shopping malls, and highways that are truly globalized spaces have a marked, identified purpose. (9) Like Jovanovic's photographs, Bennett renders interstitial zones nestled in between sub-divisions, roads, strip malls, and agricultural land. It is neither built nor exactly un-built, neither cleaned up for a purpose, nor a piece of land left to vicissitudes of nature. It is deeded, titled, taxed. Despite all appearances to the contrary, it remains productive though seemingly fallow--its proximity to new construction no doubt increasing the value.

In The Painting of Modern Life (1985), T.J. Clark identifies in Impressionist painting a fascination with the castoff, half-improved, banlieue regions beyond Georges-Eugene Haussmann's brilliant boulevards. The most mordant example Clark describes is Vincent van Gogh's The Outskirts of Paris (1886), in which a lone gaslight sits at the crossing of dirt paths in an empty field with factories and a windmill in the distance. The lamppost is a harbinger of the development to come in the now empty space. "The factories ... will replace the windmill, and the villas will march across the mud and cornfields until they reach the premonitory gas standard." (10) Like the wastelands singled out by Bennett, they are in proximity to developed areas and, through the invisible strings of the real estate market, bound up to unseen events and growth patterns. While centralized, government-mandated Haussmannization governs the van Gogh, the haphazard, bullish real estate market of suburban Toronto haunts Bennett's photographs.