Assignment 0: Matt

Hello class: welcome to our History 8630 American Built Environment sketchbook blog. Here you will post your weekly assignments, and the photos you take to illustrate them.

For example, this weekend I visited the "...After the Suburbs" show, where I saw this photograph:

Sheila Pree Bright, Suburbia series, Untitled 11

Here we see an ordinary suburban house. But the photograph conveys much more: it suggests the tensions between man and nature inherent to suburbia, it poses questions about where the photographer is (in a car, in the rain?). It also challenges conventional ideas about the built environment as socially (or at least racially) exclusionary, since Bright's Suburbia series is of African American families and their houses.

I look forward to your posts, once we get the logistics of this blog set, and you begin to get your assignments.