HOME LIFE

For the last ten years of my career I traveled around the country and photographed apartment communities. On the way, I sat in silence on a coastal cliff in California staring at the line where grey sky blended into grey water - letting the night absorb my heat and thought. I had lunch with the maintenance crew of an apartment complex in Long Island, New York - quietly watching them watch the news and eat their chicken parmesan sandwiches. I leaned over the unsecured edge of a high-rise rooftop in downtown Pittsburgh, my body tingling as I peered down into the street. I feared for my safety as I was taunted and harassed by residents of apartments I was assigned to photograph. I floated in black, bottomless water in the mountains of Wyoming. A Mississippi woman taught me how to peel shrimp when she saw me struggling with my takeout basket of fresh crustaceans. I met many, many wonderful humans. I wasted many, many nights in hotel rooms, untethered from my home and family. The experiences were rich and meaningful but also exhausting and lonely.

I got to be home every day. Not my home, but somebody’s. People were at work, or maybe inside sleeping, or watching me walk around taking pictures of the apartment buildings. I found the stuffed animals they dropped and forgot. I read their inscriptions scratched into the laundry room door. I saw their record of time spent on the patio - a vast quantity of cigarette butts. The evidence of life being spent was all around, waiting to be documented. Happily, I documented - feeling the significance of the presence and passage of life.

It was a privilege to observe and document homes. To share the quiet place where a person spends the majority of their life. I don’t want to photograph the mountains, I want to photograph the mundane place where someone lays and dreams of the mountains - where their desire is most real. I want to photograph the unremarkable place where someone forgets mountains - where their resignation is palpable. These are sacred places. Many people will never climb a mountain. They will dream of climbing a mountain and forget the dream. And they will go to work and come home. And kiss their kids. And play games. And laugh. And eat dinner. And sleep. And go to work and come home. And ignore people they love. And fight. And cry. And go to work and come home. All the while accumulating memories, shaping their lives, and leaving bits of story behind. I want to collect those holy bits of mundane story. I want to preserve the places of dreaming and forgetting.