This essay was originally published in ART PAPERS July/August 2007, Vol 31, issue 4.
For the past two years, Sheila Pree Bright has been photographing affluent, African-American suburban homes around Atlanta. Suburbia, the resulting series of forty images, conjures elusive narratives of socio-economic and racial identity through details of architectural design and interior décor. The actual homeowners appear infrequently in the work, and never as specific individuals. Suburbia‘s subject matter, upper-middle-class African- American lifestyles, is both largely invisible in mainstream media and familiar to her. However, Bright does not uncritically assume the transparency of either her subject or her medium. A definite sense of self- consciousness—on the part of both artist and homeowners—pervades Suburbia: each photograph is exquisitely composed, with clean lines and diffused lighting matching the casual elegance of the suburban homes. The placement of objects and figures appears to be the result of both happenstance and calculation–a paradox that holds the work in delicate tension.
