A look into the daily, and often routine, lives of those in the Silicon Valley hang in full color on a museum wall, as patrons peer into the homes and lifestyles of their neighbors.

Over 20 photos of middle-class, suburban dwelling South Bay citizens are on display in the Oakland Museum of California in the latest exhibit investigating contemporary California topics.

“I lived in the Silicon Valley for 30 years before moving to San Francisco in 2004,” explained Beth Yarnelle Edwards, photographer of “Suburban Dreams,” the latest photography exhibit at the museum.  “I began to photograph there because I was interested in what people enjoyed about their lives in the suburbs as well as the prices they paid to live there, to maintain their big homes and lawns but not have much street life.”

The photographs range from a woman laying in a bubble bath and looking over the expansive green through her large bathroom window, to an old couple taking their pills over breakfast in their kitchen.  Each photograph gives a very different glance into the day-to-day lives of the middle-class living in the technological hub of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Silicon Valley is not quite a valley per say, but it is the home of silicon chips, better known as microchips, or tiny wafers of semiconducting material used in almost every electronic in the market.  The Valley contains companies of great stature in the technology world such as Google, Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

Throughout the South Bay tech giants are not alone in living out their version of the American Dream in the warm California sun. Suburban sprawls stretch for miles across the Silicon Valley, with more than a million people living in San Jose, the capital of the region.

Mysticism lies within the walls of the suburban lifestyle and that is where her interest was sparked, according to Edwards.  A former resident of 30 years in the South Bay, the photographer has now worked for over 16 of those years capturing the lives of others in what she calls a voyeuristic style.

“I consider myself a stalker of the real,” explained Edwards in a press release from the museum.  “I am intrigued by all kinds of people and their homes and their things.  I want to look under everybody’s beds.  I want to see in everybody’s closets!”

“The exhibition’s subject matter is quintessentially Californian,” said Drew Johnson, curator of photography & visual culture at the museum, in a press release for the event.  “Going back to the Baby Boom days, the California ideal of suburban dream life has cast a powerful spell on the rest of the world.  The photographs in ‘Suburban Dreams’ have taken on an added dimension in light of the economic difficulties in recent years.”

Edwards explained that she wants to keep her work focused on the middle class because she thinks it is neglected artistically.  She continues to work on creating what she calls layered stories, working through the art of gaining her subjects trust and gaining access to their homes.

Her photos are partially staged, and Edwards believes this leads to authenticity.  The artistry she conveys through the images lends a “surreal sense” to each snapshot, a quality that attracted Johnson to her work, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

“Suburban Dreams” will be on display in the Oakland Museum of California through June 30, in the Gallery of California Art, and a monograph featuring fifty-six photographs by Edwards will be available in the museum’s store.

On April 26, Edwards and Johnson will team up to lead patrons on a stroll through the gallery to get a unique perspective on the messages behind the art.