PROJECT STATEMENT
As the availability of affordable housing implodes, with evic:on rates and financial instability surpassing crisis levels, my ongoing project - Where the Heart Is: Portraits from American Trailer and Mobile Home Parks investigates and advocates for this deeply impacted, primarily American housing form and its residents. This multimedia, spatial justice collaboration challenges the ingrained stereotyping of the estimated 22 million Americans who live in communities of manufactured homes (as stigmatized trailer and mobile homes are being rebranded), revealing and archiving what’s rapidly being lost in their communities, while amplifying resident’s and advocate’s voices.
My eye and heart are informed by impromptu conversations and videoed interviews with community residents from around the country, collaboration with professionals and scholars like Dr. Esther Sullivan – Sociologist, author, and advocate at UC Denver, and my affiliation with the national housing advocacy non-profit – MHAction (Manufactured Housing Action).
I’m especially drawn to photograph the yards and entryways around homes where individual choices in ornamentation and landscaping reveal the personalities of the unseen occupants and capture their notions of welcome, of beauty, and of home. Portraits of individual homes are also visually classified and constructed into a library of typology grids, archiving differences and commonalities within and across communities and states.
Expanding gentrification around many parks has increased the vulnerability of the essential workers, families, veterans, immigrants, and retiree residents, who rely on this largest, unsubsidized form of low-income housing. The lack of protective regulations make parks the target of equity investors, often leading to the loss of affordability for the leased site under residents’ self-owned homes, with subsequent harassment, eviction, and displacement.
Where the Heart Is was begun in 2017 with travels photographing within communities, to date, in Maine, New Jersey, California, Texas, Colorado, New York, Georgia, Oregon, and Arizona.
Recorded and edited video interviews of resident's personal experiences from a number of these and eleven additional states including Wyoming, Iowa, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Florida are integral components of the project’s narrative as short video clips, for book quotes, for videos incorporating my imagery with commissioned drone footage and recorded interview clips, and collaborative exhibition opportunities in service to affordable housing advocacy.