During his childhood the local residents still enjoyed open space, with grand old houses surrounded by farms and fields. In the adjacent community of Norwood, strip malls on the fringes of town compete with the traditional, centrally located shopping zone where Gearty used to visit his uncle's shoe store. Adolfo Barandiaran captured this image of Caribe Lake Homes in west Miami-Dade County, Fla., in 1997. There's a sense of land being replaced and an even greater sense of where it's going, seen with a very wistful eye. Laments over the bulldozing of the wilderness, the loss of neighborhood character, and the spread of car culture are commonplace today.
Sprawl includes work by seven photographers, each with a different approach.
For instance, Alex MacLean pilots his own plane, and his aerial shots reveal perversely beautiful patterns in neat rows of rooftops. Also among the more than 70 images are candid portraits of suburbanites hanging out at the mall, or posing for a family portrait in front of a Pontiac Trans-Am. When their work is grouped, a cumulative meaning takes place. Gearty, a freelance photographer who teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Art Institute of Boston, cocurated Sprawl with Henry Horenstein, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design who has written best-selling photography manuals. The pair arrived at the phenomenon of sprawl because they saw it as a timely subject, given society's growing environmental consciousness.