Inspired by literature and cinema, the pictures in Suburban Splendour owe much to the American short story writer Raymond Carver.
It seems to me that Carver’s vision of ordinary blue collar people living lives of quiet desperation taps into a sense of contemporary isolation that reflects the anomie, uncertainties and vulnerabilities of existing in a world changed after 9/11, and on a planet which contemplates an undecided environmental future. These compressed cinematic frames try to articulate something of the soft lament that Carver alludes to. The characters are troubled, but not irretrievably lost; they carry a dignified endurance and a sense of bruised optimism. These people are survivors. They have a desire, as we all do, to be transported from darkness into light.
Graham Miller 2007