PROJECT STATEMENT
As the availability of affordable housing collapses with eviction rates and financial instability surpassing crisis levels, my ongoing multi-media project - Where the Heart Is: Portraits from American Trailer and Mobile Home Parks investigates and advocates for this deeply impacted American housing form and its residents. This collaboration with residents and housing advocates 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. Still photographic portraits of residents and their homes, video interviews, commissioned drone footage, and transcribed quotes from resident interviews all work together to reveal and archive what is being threatened and rapidly lost in their communities, while amplifying resident’s and advocate’s voices.
Expanding gentrification around many parks has increased the vulnerability of the essential workers, young families, veterans, immigrants, and retiree residents, who rely on this largest, un-subsidized 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 or rented homes, with subsequent eviction and displacement. The frequency that residents of all ages and demographics have confided in me about their constant fear of becoming homeless, as some of their former neighbors have, is staggering.
My eye and heart are informed by conversations and recorded 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 resident led, national housing advocacy non-profit – Manufactured Housing Action (MHAction).
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.
Where the Heart Is was begun in 2017 by photographing in Arizona, Maine, New Jersey, California, Texas, Colorado, New York, Georgia, and Oregon. As relationships developed with community residents and affordable housing advocates around the country, in 2023 I began making still portraits and formally recorded video interviews with residents from some of the above states, as well as eleven additional states including Wyoming, Iowa, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Florida.
These new components more deeply reflect and incorporate residents’ lived experiences, viewpoints, and concerns as integral parts of the work in service to housing advocacy.