This photo series by Liz Kuball called California Vernacular is so spot on- I think it's fantastic. The photos speak for themselves, but her statement behind the work gives them so much more perspective. The words below are hers...
When you move out to California from back east, you come for a reason:
You’re leaving behind a bad relationship, or escaping your hometown, or
thinking you’ll be a star. And what you find when you get here is that
things aren’t what you thought they’d be.
There’s some of what you
expected—sunshine and palm trees and long, wide beaches. But there’s
more: houses with cacti and succulents in place of the green lawns you
grew up with; women in bikinis climbing ladders; trees groomed in an
archway, the expected path between them blocked by a gateless
chain-link fence.
You answer an ad on craigslist for a used car and
find yourself in a boxed-in car lot in Van Nuys and go for pie at
Du-par’s afterward, because pie makes sense when you’re on Ventura
Boulevard and it’s 95 degrees and the car wasn’t what the ad said it
would be.
And you’d think that, after all this, you’d become
disillusioned and go back home, and some do, of course, but many more
of us stay and instead of growing bitter, we hang on—hang on to a world
that, to us, is even more fantastic than the one we thought we’d find,
because it’s real in its absurdity and because we have stories to tell.
See the whole series over on Liz Kuball's site, along with more great work.
