Emily Shur: Sunshine Terrace

Emily Shur – Sunshine Terrace
Deadbeat Club

Emily Shur turns her lens on the vernacular architecture and muted eccentricities of her Los Angeles neighbourhood in Sunshine Terrace, a book that maps the liminal spaces of suburban life. Her images are marked by a compositional precision that isolates textures – stucco walls, gravel beds, corrugated fences – into near-abstractions. Yet this formal clarity coexists with a quiet strangeness: a garage gate lit like eyes, a forgotten shopping cart, shadows that fall awkwardly across architectural seams. Shur adopts the role of a flâneur within her own environment, allowing chance details to guide the rhythm of the work. The result is not an exposé of place, but a study in surfaces, absence and the quiet codes of domestic space. Sunshine Terrace is at once specific and generic – a portrait of a neighbourhood, but also of how we read space when it is rendered unfamiliar.