Texas-based photographer Eli Durst examines suburbia and social conditions in his work, and his new book, The Four Pillars, sits firmly at the intersection of those two themes.

Several years ago, Durst began to spend time with a faith-based self-help group attended by American suburbanites who had become disillusioned or directionless. The founder of that group gave a lecture which inspired the title of the book. Durst chose to use this phrase as the title, as it embodies “the language of self-help and self-actualisation” while remaining an ambiguous and generic term (“try googling ‘the four pillars’,” he says). “It’s open-ended but also clearly references the desire for a path, a guide for how to live, which I think people crave.”

Many of the images are based in social settings, both pleasurable (county fairs, amateur theatre) and practical (pregnancy groups, team bonding classes). Even though the photographs unravel in communal contexts, Durst manages to isolate people within those scenarios, directing our attention to the individual’s expression and forcing us to consider the conditions that may have led them to this point.

Compared to Durst’s first book The Community – which captured scout meetings and corporate team building in America’s community spaces – “this series is less about the group literally and more about the ideas they discussed,” he explains. For instance, “feeling unfulfilled in their suburban American lives, a desire to better know themselves, and the ways in which social pressures have restricted their paths or options”.

The idea of invention is in many ways central to self-improvement practices, and invention in turn shaped how Durst created the body of work.

Some of the photographs are entirely set up, while others aren’t staged at all (or at least, not by Durst). The images shot in the self-defence classes, for example, involved only minor intervention from the photographer. “Some of the images, like the one of the acting classes at the university where I teach, are what I consider to be documentary photography of staged exercises,” he says. “Other images I restaged or altered … to create a greater sense of ambiguity or defamiliarisation – to try to portray something quotidian in a new strange way that asks us to reconsider its significance.”

The inconspicuous blend of real and unreal was both a creative and a practical choice. He recalls being “moved by how members of the self-help group would openly weep in front of each other”.

“Sticking a camera into someone’s face while they’re being so vulnerable is obviously problematic,” he says. “So for one image, I hired actors to cry on command together. It was completely staged but also became a deeply emotional experience. In many ways, the work is about complicating the reductive dichotomy we have in photography of staged vs candid, truth vs fiction.”

Durst explains that his practice is informed by the work of photographers such as Chris Killip, Deana Lawson, Michael Schmidt and Collier Schorr, but more than anything, says that The Four Pillars takes after vernacular imagery – “the holiday card, the maternity shoot, the instructional demo”.

“I’m interested in these forms because they complicate the simplistic photographic dichotomy of candid vs constructed; everyone knows that when a smiling family poses for a holiday card, they are re-enacting a performance, embodying an image they have seen countless times before. It is an aspirational image but one that contains deeper truths about who we are and what we desire.”

The Four Pillars by Eli Durst is published by Loose Joints; loosejoints.biz; elidurst.com