It might be wrong to categorize Microlawns as a photography blog. The text that accompanies each image makes up at least half the art of the series. But it's the images featured that unleash the floodgates of suburban ennui, the odd things we middle-class humans do to introduce living sparks into our mostly banal and uniform existences. 

The blog takes a sharp-edged sense of humor to its presentation. Each photo--taken by the author/photographer--features a tiny patch of grass in an otherwise concrete microlandscape. They've been dubbed "microlawns" and they're a somewhat confounding addition to the Californian scenery the creator captures. I mean, why allow a tiny trapezoid of crab grass to thrive in an otherwise lifeless patch of world? What aesthetic value does that speck of green bestow? If we're going for green, for thin amalgamations of nature in a modern locale, why not carve a whole garden into the pavement? Why keep it to a 3" by 5" of only grass?

But these are suburban standards, sewn into the grey as though we'd forget what plant life looked like without that small, unkempt reminder. Microlawns attaches itself to that absurd habit of ours and allows us to laugh at it with some truly biting prose. It carries the visual aesthetic of a hobby photography blog, but the subject matter and its accompanying texts elevate the site to a level of real satire and critique of contemporary American existence. These are our jungles, our plains, our ecosystems--sixteen square feet of grass, barely room enough to house a family of earthworms. What does that say about us?