Joe Sabol

20 Regular

20 Regular aims to capture both the mundanity and the strangeness that makes up my home state of New Jersey and beyond. When I was younger, I dreamed of one day leaving Jersey and never returning, resenting the banality of the suburbs and believing it to be somehow inferior to the rest of the world. However, I have since developed a newfound respect for my home state; despite the slew of poor public opinion, is a predominantly working-class, imperfect, authentic part of the American landscape. Perhaps it’s so frowned upon because it is wholly representative of what it means to be just a regular person, and our society has taught us to equate that with inferiority. But, through my artistic process, I have uncovered the strange beauty of the “totally normal” town and the depth of its blue collar inhabitants. I touch on a number of themes, ranging from maps and geography to nostalgia, and wanderlust. This stems from a lifelong desire to preserve and illuminate historical events, even those events whose importance is only relevant to a small number of people. I regard my photography as part of that archival process, with each site that I shoot serving as a portion of a map, a scene in a story. I enjoy photographing the juxtapositions that occur naturally in places, the homes next to cemeteries or churches beside convenience stores. As well as little oddities within communities that make each place special, such as signs advertising the bizarre locally made soft drinks. Through photographing common and overlooked sites and landscapes in equally unnoticed overlooked towns are gifted with a sense of archival importance they remind us the mundane is actually quite fascinating to exist in the first place.