Graham Miller is a photographic artist and co-founder of FotoFreo, a biennial international festival of photography based in Freemantle, Western Australia.

Suburban Splendour refers to the unease beneath the manicured lawns, garden sheds, white picket fences and shimmering facades of middle-class Australia; an unease that is described by Miller in terms of a vague but inconsolable longing, an unnamed enigmatic yearning. This is represented in terms of the “theatricality and artifice” of staged photographs (Miller references the work of Philip-Lorca di Corcia) in which male hookers, addicts and drifters are posed in elaborately staged shots.

Miller says:

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”?