Shot using a Fujifilm medium format camera, these images document the prosaic structures of urban and suburban America to assess the values that are portrayed through its modern structures.
As I ventured further away from these cosmopolitan cities into the suburban stretches covering much of the United States, I looked towards the New Topographics artists for inspiration. The group - including the photographers Robert Adams, Frank Gohlke, and Stephen Shore - came to prominence in the 1970s; it emphasized the relationship between man-made structures and nature through their documentation of American suburbia. Their alleged absence of style is ironically the style that has had an influence on the construction of these images.
As an visitor to the United States, I was particularly drawn by the similarities that could be drawn between these cities and my hometown of Dubai, bound together by a hunger for capitalistic growth and prowess. As such, these photographs are a memoir of the surroundings that I was most enthralled by, and it is as much a personal journal of my time in the United States as a commentary on urban America.
Sigmund Freud’s On Dreams and On Creativity and the Unconscious nourished my fascination with lucid dreaming, and more particularly its ability to shed new light on a greater understanding of my spiritual and creative self. I see lucid dreaming as the vessel to another world of inhibited discovery, where adventure and curiosity combine to create an artist’s haven.
My experiences with lucid dreaming revealed the power of dreams, and the infancy of our scientific understanding of them. Every night, I entered a world where the duality of forces, seemingly good and bad, light and dark, came together to create a neutral, ying-yang playground where my deep-seated, subconscious emotions could be resolved. I maintained a dream journal, documented any emotions I felt after a long dream cycle, and turned to photography to visualize these mental escapades.
The result is the series of pictures that follow. Each photograph, shot on a 30mm roll using a Canon AE-1, captures a scene that brings back my deep-seated, yet shared emotions, and is part of an extended dream story. It is my hope that this story can evoke equally strong feelings within the viewer and compel them to transcend their reality, even if for a moment, to consider one ever more emotionally charged.
