Rural New Jersey Houses

Lothar H Troeller

My “Rural New Jersey Houses” show surfaces. The surface is where the eye stops. I do not show people who might still live inside the houses; I do not look through the window. I show the façade; I show the outside structure, old, from around the middle of the last century that defined rural Southern New Jersey. They are in color, even the sky has its color as expected, blue with white clouds like you would see in a friendly ‘real estate’ brochure. I chose a fixed vantage point from which to capture the elements of this landscape reducing traces of subjectivity in my compositions. Like in the brochures I leave the sunny environment to juxtapose the rather emotionally expressionless ‘estate.’ To encourage closer examination and active comparison of structural features, I plan to exhibit these photographs in grids, a way of showing the pieces reflecting the change of rural surroundings into an arrangement of uniform dispositions, intimating encroaching urban anonymity. This documentation serves as the memory of the quickly forgotten pre-urban lifestyles in a time of mass-produced condominiums and prefab housing developments. These pictures might invite one to revisit in their minds a parent’s or grandparent’s home, to reconnect to the past that is remote and dying - barely seen from the main roads anymore - strip malls and supermarkets dominate the urbanized landscape crushing the past.

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