“…the creeping mildew that already circumscribes all of our towns. This death by slow decay is called Subtopia…” Ian Nairn
“Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.” Philip Larkin
In this project I travelled around suburban Birmingham, in England’s Heartland, and discovered a society lost, confused and in search of an identity – a little like myself at the time of making these pictures. In Subtopia, the parades of shops, parks, avenues and bus-stops – alley- ways, wastelands and low-rise buildings – these locations and the people who inhabit them become, for me, both real and imaginary. Fiction and reality blend together through my subjective interpretation allowing all the complexities, ambiguities and contradictions apparent in the world to be foregrounded and thus providing the viewer with a fragmented narrative of the contemporary English suburbs.
Adrian Saker
