PAUL TAKEUCHI

is a Brooklyn-based photographer. He has won numerous grants and awards, and his work has been widely published and exhibited internationally.

SUBURBAN GEOMETRIES 1998—present (ongoing)

Suburban Geometries is a long-term project which explores the formal qualities of the suburban landscape. I’m interested in the graphic aspects of architecture and designed landscape, the intersection of competing planes, colors, textures, and light. I often compose across neighbors’ yards to invite comparisons of houses, plantings, cars, mailboxes, trash and recycling bins.

These compositions explore how we compete and harmonize with our neighbors. As this project has evolved, I’ve embraced the spatial tensions between the quiet symmetries and accidental geometries of shadow, line, and color hidden in everyday suburban lives.

The work shown here was mostly taken in California—in Westlake (near San Francisco), Santa Maria on the Central Coast, and Sunset Beach (near L.A.) . For the past decade, I have also documented the suburbs of other cities, including San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Seattle, New Smyrna Beach, FL, Washington, D.C., and my home, Brooklyn.

I've divided up the images into categories somewhat based on subject matter: Grids, Basketball, House & Car, Flora, Car Windows, Cats & Dogs, Details, Splits, Mosaics, and Xmas.

GRIDS

A nod to the formalist typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher, California style in color. Below San Diego Driveways, 1998 (redone digital edition 2024). These are the first photographs I took that kicked off the Suburban Geometries series.

BASKETBALL

Hoops for suburban layups are in many driveways or curbside.

HOUSE & CAR

Automobiles add another dimension to our homes, a social statement, a box of color that extends the domestic landscape beyond the house.

CAR WINDOWS

The play of dappled light on a rectangilar trace of last night's frosted glass is my kind of great discovery.

CATS & DOGS

The Secret Suburban Life of Pets. How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?

DETAILS

Closer compositions.

MOSAICS

I think of these photographs as a bento box view of suburbia, with the grid of rectangles and triangles stacked together like an interlocking tetris.

FLORA

Plants, flowers, and landscaping as the defining subject. Often I felt a frisson of synethesia as the textures grated into the grids of different colors.

SPLITS

Property lines most often are strongly delineated, but sometimes landscaping overflows.

XMAS

Christmas decorations can create an accidental visual rhythm to compositions.