This American Life

This American Life. Oceanside, California, 2011

I am in sort of a nostalgic, introspective mood, so I thought I’d go back to an image I created in the summer of 2011 while in Oceanside, California awaiting the start of the Race Across America (I was part of the support crew for Team Dex Tooke). 

I was wandering around town–with the camera, as always–when this scene caught my eye.  To me, it symbolized the very antiseptic feeling of many American neighborhoods.  It contrasts greatly with the warmth and human interaction present in the many, oftentimes economically much poorer, “barrios” I have seen and lived in throughout Spain and Latin America.

I deliberately left an empty foreground as a symbol of the potential emptiness of life in separate, identical, enclosed boxes.  Then you have the garage doors–the automobile as a priority in everyone’s life…and the lack of a human presence–they are all inside plugged-in to their electronic media, perhaps?  Only the wires above the homes indicate some sort of connection to the outside world. 

This is what I felt and thought when I created this image.