I find this to be a very interesting image. I shot this photo on a roadtrip down to southern California. This is somewhere in northern California (also known as the good part) along I-5. The photo is very ironic because as "perfect" and "picturesque" this place seem, California has slowly been becoming a rotting pile of trash for the past half a century. Also considering I was riding in the back of my parents' gas-guzzling Lexus SUV while I took this photograph adds to the irony of it. There is endless pollution and ignorance that plagues this state. California has become the epitome of an Illusion of Paradise.
This image has many parallels with an album that was recently released by a band I am a big fan of called Pulling Teeth. The album is called Paradise Illusions/Paranoid Delusions, and the concept of the album follows the same lines as what I had mentioned above. Things in the Western World, America specifically, are created to make an illusion of Paradise (shopping malls, theme parks, gated communities, etc.) to entertain, satisfy and distract us from the serious problems that we refuse to or are unable to confront. Here is the album art for the record (which is double-sided) that represents these themes very well:
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