graham miller artwork

graham miller

“It might be more useful, if not necessarily true, to think of photography as a narrow deep area between the novel and the film”
Lewis Baltz, photographer

"The inspiration for Suburban Splendour came from numerous sources. Images materialised from encounters observed while driving, walking to the shops or visiting friends, from eavesdropping and casual conversation, but more often than not the photographs were inspired by literature and cinema. Films by Paul Thomas Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, and Ray Lawrence all contributed, as did writing by Richard Ford and the lyrics of Paul Kelly. But the background soundtrack which remained constant was the voice of the American short story writer Raymond Carver. Carver’s vision depicts ordinary blue collar people living lives of quiet desperation, people who are feeling their way in the dark with the hope that maybe next week things will get better. Reading his work, now nearly twenty years after his death, it seems to me that his writing 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.

Melancholy has always appeared to be just under the skin of the suburban vernacular. Australians are more affluent than ever, and politicians monotonously boast of economic prosperity, but we are no happier now than we were fifty years ago. Life seems a process of replacing one anxiety for another; one desire for another. The elusive dream of happiness is continuously postponed. What if happiness is not a final destination that we plan to arrive at and then stay, but a fragile and fleeting emotion, an intermittent state that evaporates leaving us with a lingering backdrop of what Julia Kristeva calls “a sad voluptuousness, a despondent intoxication”?

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call saudade, or the German sehnsucht, a vague but inconsolable longing, an unnamed enigmatic yearning. Nick Cave in ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’, describes saudade as an inexplicable sadness which lies at the heart of certain works of art, and a quality which is an essential part of what it is to be human. “The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart,” he says “will never be able to write convincingly about wonder, the magic and the joy of love…so within the fabric of the Love Song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of suffering.”

The compressed cinematic frames of Suburban Splendour try to articulate something of the soft lament that Cave and Carver allude to. These 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