Pleasure-seeking in the New York ‘burbs, as shot by Corey Olsen

While studying at New York’s School of Visual Arts photographer Corey Olsen took a train up to City Island on the outskirts of the Bronx, a quaint suburbia that is aesthetically somewhere between Corey’s New England upbringing and the set of Edward Scissorhands . Here he photographed the white SUVs, pleasure boats and residential details of the island; as well as staged portraits of his friends that aren’t unlike the stock photographs on the walls of your local Snappy Snaps.

Corey’s photographs capture the tropes of this culturally specific but widely understood landscape with humour and some brilliant observations of the quiet moments of tedium and performance in small-town America. Now graduated from SVA, his first solo show has just opened at New York’s Julia Saul Gallery, where Corey is exhibiting his series Garage Still Lifes. He describes these as “an attempt to make sense of these objects [in his garage] in a particular time… and create still lifes that possess nostalgia and meaning, primarily expressed through form and colour.”