Martin Adolfsson

Martin Adolfsson is a Swedish photographer who has been based in New York City since 2007. He shoots portraits, travel and architectural work for magazines and advertising agencies around the globe. His personal work focuses on social structures and behaviors. In his book project, Suburbia Gone Wild, he photographed model homes built for the new upper middle class in emerging economies around the world. The project has received wide spread attention and has been nominated for several awards. In his upcoming project, Geographic Proximity, he continues to explore the shifting landscape of national identity in a global era and how it’s reshaping the world we live in. Martin is member of New Museums incubator platform New Inc. Today we take a look at his series Suburbia Gone Wild.

Suburbia Gone Wild

Photographer Martin Adolfsson’s project Suburbia Gone Wild provides a fascinating window into one of the greatest structural changes of the 21st-century, the rise of the upper middle class in the developing world. Exploring the search for identity among this new strata of society, Adolfsson takes us where they live: the shiny, newly-developed suburbs surrounding the new economic centers of the world.

By focusing on model homes and the suburban landscape, his approach is best described as a combination of positively amusing and awkwardly eerie, as he documents a curious phenomenon that looks more and more like the constructed world of The Truman Show. The work expands across every continent and includes the suburbs of Bangkok, Shanghai, Bangalore, Cairo, Moscow, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo and Mexico City.

Using a handheld SLR camera, nothing has been lit, removed or altered in any of the photos. By using an assistant to distract Realtors, the artist has shot all of the model homes without supervision of any PR person or sales representative. No permissions or permits have been acquired by any of the developers.

To view more of Martin’s work, please visit his website.