In pictures: Intimate encounters with strangers in US suburbia

Journeys have a way of shaping creativity. Sometimes they are literal, tracing miles across highways and anonymous city streets. Other times, they are internal, marked by dislocation, fear and the shifting ways we see ourselves in others. For Samantha Sutcliffe, both kinds of journeys converge in Broken Mirror, a photographic series that has unfolded over the past decade. The work follows her movement through America and through her own interior landscapes, collecting moments that are raw, strange and intimate. “The work evolved organically. My only rule was to follow my intuition, which is to get lost,” she explains, and that sense of drifting defines the series.

Sutcliffe grew up in a small New Jersey town, where her father’s constant presence with a camera and the darkroom he built in their basement became her first education in photography. “My father always had a camera, so I learned about photography through him,” she recalls. At 18, she moved to Brooklyn, imagining she might become a nutritionist or social worker. “I flunked out of my 8am chemistry class because the commute from my apartment to Harlem was two hours on the 1/2/3 trains. I ended up missing my classes. Eventually, I got in a car and ended up on the West Coast for five years working in different factories and assisting on film sets until I decided to come back home.” This rhythm of departure and return, of losing and reorienting, set the tone for her creative practice.

Broken Mirror began in 2013 with an encounter with someone she met through a Craigslist ad. “One of the first photographs from the series is of an older woman lying naked in her bed, which I took in 2013, when I was 22 years old. She lived in a cookie-cutter suburban complex and invited me over to take photographs for her husband, inspired by 50 Shades of Grey.” The photograph captures a suburban intimacy that is both tender and uneasy, and it became the foundation for the project. From there, one encounter led to another. “One thing always led to the next,” she says, describing a process that was never linear but instead driven by curiosity and instinct.

At first, Sutcliffe thought she was documenting other people, but over time, she realised she was also confronting herself. “I used to think I was documenting the ‘other’, but now I realise I’m confronting my own fears. I see myself in most of the photographs.” That recognition gives the series its name and its charge. “The title comes from a childhood drawing of mine from 1996 that depicts a girl throwing herself into a vanity mirror surrounded by mistletoe.” It is an image of shattering and reflection, a metaphor that has grown with her work as she came to see her subjects not as strangers but as mirrors, refracting her own alienation back at her.

The world of Broken Mirror is unmistakably American. Suburban homes, anonymous roads, figures on the edge of visibility: they form a portrait of a country where intimacy and estrangement sit side by side. Sutcliffe acknowledges the sociological undertones in her work. “After a decade of analysing alienation, I feel more like a sociologist than a photographer,” she says. Yet the images resist detachment. They are steeped in tenderness and discomfort, in the complexity of what it means to witness people who, in her words, “are misunderstood or challenge societal norms”.

I used to think I was documenting the ‘other’, but now I realise I’m confronting my own fears – Samantha Sutcliffe

Her understanding of photography shifted during the years she balanced this project with paid work in New York City. “Between 2021 and 2023, I was frequently hired as an event photographer in New York City while pursuing my documentary work in the suburbs. I was being paid to take photographs of writers and influencers, and the images would end up circulating on social media for promotion. I took on the position of a content creator, and that freaked me out,” she explains. “I was a spectator of different social cliques but also an outcast, taking portraits of people in the limelight.” The contrast between the glossy circulation of those images and the raw intimacy of her series forced her to reconsider her role. “Now I recognise the value of my position as an outsider helped me understand the relationship between alienation and consumption. I view image-making a lot differently now. Photography once was a compulsion to be celebrated, and now it’s painful and brings me tears. I find more meaning in the images that I can not put online.”

The result is that Broken Mirror feels almost too private for the digital age. It resists the easy circulation of content, asking instead for quiet attention. Sutcliffe does not give her audience a fixed message but hopes for a more open response: “I want the work to offer an unfiltered look at the human condition, particularly people who are misunderstood or challenge societal norms.” That unfiltered vision lingers in every photograph, where moments of trust, estrangement and fragility are allowed to remain unresolved.

To look at Broken Mirror is to step inside a journey that is both Sutcliffe’s and America’s: highways and bedrooms, strangers and reflections, loneliness and sudden intimacy. It is not a neat portrait but a fractured one, where every shard of the mirror reveals something different. In those fragments, Sutcliffe finds not only her subjects but herself – and invites us to confront our own reflections, however unsettling they might be.