Photographers Keep Pace with Suburbs' Complexity, Professor Says
The University of Minnesota's John Archer charts changing views of suburbs in movies and photographs.
Photographers have done a better job than filmmakers at capturing the complex nature of suburban life, according to University of Minnesota professor John Archer. A local photographer working near Fridley is one of Archer's prime examples of how the makers of still images reflect unexpected suburban realities that motion pictures often pass over. Movies like The Stepford Wives (1975) and American Beauty (1999) broadly satirized suburban America as "a place of hollowness," Archer said in a recent lecture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. It's a theme that has persisted in films from the 1970s to the present, he said. Still Images The same theme appears in the photography documenting suburban life over the last 40 years. But many …
In this Article:
