ABSTRACT
As I peruse the Instagram output of hobby photographers who share an interest in the exteriors of suburban houses, I see a repressed response to urban consolidation. In cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, high-rise blocks of apartments are replacing familiar residential streetscapes, but the Instagrammers I follow choose to turn their cameras away from these conspicuous monoliths. Instead, their cumulative streams of ordinary houses and gardens produce a kind of mediated uncanny in which they share with their followers not only nostalgia for the imaginary present but also – paradoxically and perhaps unwittingly – an embrace of the change that is happening around them.
