For all of its open space, the suburbs can be so homogenous as to feel claustrophobic. Eric Tomberlin conveys that brilliantly in Garden, a collage of 150 images that come together to create one hellish vision of suburbia.
The inspiration for the photo struck last fall as Tomberlin drove through an affluent development in the Seattle suburb of Issaquah. The houses, built on the side of a mountain about a decade ago to house legions of Microsoft workers, were all basically the same, the Stepford wives of housing. “I was overwhelmed by this homogenized manifestation of the American Dream,” he says.
Tomberlin wanted to make a single photo that captured the bewildering feeling of being surrounded by identical houses, but he knew it couldn’t be done from a single vantage point. “The experience of moving through the neighborhood was more interesting than any specific vignette,” he says. “The sum of the whole said more than any of the individual parts.”
He returned one sunny morning and spent three hours roaming the streets—trying not to look like a creep—and snapping 300 pictures from various angles and distances. The idea was to fuse them digitally, combining the power of time-based, narrative film with the punchy delivery of a still image.
Tomberlin spent a month creating the composite—splicing 150 of his best shots together in Photoshop. He masked out the sky in each image so he could stack the houses one atop the other, playing with the scale to produce a weird, undulating perspective. It's like suburbia stretches to infinity, and the effect is so seamless it almost looks real.
The result is claustrophobic. Lookalike houses crowd the landscape and swallow up the green. It’s a dread-inducing satire of suburbs, which Tomberlin believes are the product of our consumer culture that drives people to seek more more more. That insatiable hunger never ends well. As he says, “I wanted to poke fun at our arrival at this destination—the end of the road where we run out of room to expand."
