Bronx-born photographer Allen Palmer focuses on kitschy and archetypal American scenes in a way that invites viewers to ponder the image’s darker underbelly. Frequently depicting empty rooms, deserted streets and inanimate objects, the saturated and unnatural colors of his Giclée prints give these moments of Americana a deeply unsettling light. By honing in on the most incongruous object in the field, or shooting a familiar subject out of focus, Palmer leaves the viewer to investigate what might have been an unremarkable scene more attentively.

His photographs become investigations into the human unconscious, as it is stirred and suggested in his images. By revealing the uncanny objects and scenes that we routinely pass over and through, Palmer – a practicing psychoanalyst after all – confronts viewers with the unsettling elements of their everyday that otherwise go unnoticed (or unacknowledged). Palmer’s skill, as opposed to many surrealists whose art has a similar goal, is to reveal this social unconscious in a playful rather than jarring way. Allen Palmer’s works have been exhibited in the US. He currently lives and works in Newton, Massachusetts.