“Beyond the Backyard”

Bill Owens, I bought the lawn in six-foot rolls. It’s easy to handle. I prepare the ground, and my wife and son helped me roll out the grass. In one day you have a front yard (detail), 1973.

In 1998, the artist Shizuka Yokomizo sent anonymous letters to people living in ground-floor apartments in New York, London, Tokyo and Berlin. She asked them to stand at their windows at night, at specified times, so that she could photograph them from the street. One of the many people who agreed appears in “Beyond the Backyard”: Stranger (5), a young man whose minimally furnished living room—adorned with a few plants—suggests he’s a student with good taste.

Yokomizo’s work indicates how far “Beyond the Backyard” diverges from its titular subject. Although the exhibition offers myriad perspectives on the backyard, suburbanites’ favorite place to suntan and barbecue symbolizes deeper themes such as Americans’ affinity for self-display, their need to mark their territory and their expectations for their children.

Curator Karsten Lund took the majority of the show’s photographs from the MoCP’s permanent collection or its Midwest Photographers Project, through which the museum borrows regional artists’ portfolios for two-year periods. Considering the negative connotations the suburbs have acquired in the age of Desperate Housewives and $4 gas, you may be surprised by how much respect these photographs accord our dreams of green lawns and property ownership. (There are a few exceptions, such as Alex S. MacLean’s creepy Sun City Housing, March 5, 1994: an aerial view that depicts the Arizona development’s near-identical homes curving around a central parking lot in a hypnotic spiral.)

A dearth of McMansions makes it easier for viewers to empathize with the photographers’ subjects. Images of middle-class backyards and gardens portray them as tasteful sanctuaries, where anyone would like to spend an afternoon. Judging from their modest homes, the nine people mowing their lawns in a 2006 series by Greg Stimac may have few other sources of pride; the laborious task seems like it may overcome the older mowers. Dave Jordano’s 2007 photographs of two Illinois houses suggest that their owners primarily invest in their impressive collections of lawn ornaments. And one realizes the urban poor must go very far “beyond the backyard” to find a semblance of green space: The young couple in Marc PoKempner’s Picnic (1988) sit in the walkway outside a housing project with their baby, holding their lunches on their laps.

Children are ubiquitous in this exhibition, confirming their cultural connection to backyards. But the photographs suggest that adults’ efforts to provide safe places to play go unappreciated: Plenty of these kids wear cranky expressions; they leave their toys everywhere; in Nic Nicosia’s Real Pictures #11 (1988/1992), three tykes set fire to a tree.

“Beyond the Backyard” is full of serious works by pioneers such as Dorothea Lange and Garry Winogrand, but irreverent pieces like Nicosia’s are the most fun. Amy Stein’s Backyard (2005)—in which a man standing in his yard aims his shotgun at a stolid turkey, who watches him from just beyond his chain-link fence—demonstrates how a tiny patch of land becomes a battleground for struggles over identity, security and natural resources.