Working together with the rock band Arcade Fire as well as Vincent Morisset and Caroline Robert, Gabriel Jones photographed several suburbs in Texas. The series investigates the experience of living in North American suburbia and the memories that such a landscape can imprint on those who grew up there. Ultimately eight photos were used for eight different covers for the album The Suburbs, which was good for a Grammy and the Brit Award 2011 as the best album.

Gabriel Jones describes his ostensibly imaginary country of Irhann as a series of anti-glorious landscapes. In a region forsaken by man we encounter the remains of nuclear missiles and other weapons. They are as ridiculous now as they once were great and threatening. Inert, overgrown, abandoned – are these actually the killing machines that we assume them to be? Jones’s ambiguity leads the viewer down the garden path. Are we looking at the desolate landscape of a long-forgotten war – an apocalypse that wiped out mankind – or are we simply looking at a cemetery for obsolete civil materiel, booster rockets and satellites, icons of progress? Making use of photographs and video stills, Jones simultaneously suggests both hyper-reality and fantasy. His images transcend time, and lose every sense of threat. What remains is the absurdity.