The House On A Street

There is a family on A st where 13 people lived in small house, where the living room had to be converted into a bedroom and a bed once stood in the kitchen.  The house was probably only meant for a family of 3 or 4 but a family 13 decided that is place, this house would fit them and be the best for them to grow in. With slanted ceilings and floors in what I believe to be the dining room, which leads to the backroom where the water heater is, which should have been the laundry room, that leads to the back door, down some small steps, and into the nice big yard where once the only tree stood, this house is our home. Even though most of us have moved out there is always something about this house that makes us want to go back. It could be the loving parents that worked and worked in order to pay for this house, or how we . took what was there and turned it into our own, or it could be that we had an actual piece of whatever the American dream is, of owning something that you call your own.  Each room is painted a different color. Mine used to be black, which was at one point light blue, and now is an ugly light cream color, while others are either different colors of blue or purples or even a wine red.  And even though the floors in every room have different kinds of vinyl and are rotting away, the walls are written on with pencil, crayons, markers or have dirt on them, the roof  is falling, the closets have been gutted, the only bathroom (which located between two rooms), is small, old, and somewhat broken, the house is falling-this place is still our home. And now it is a home to a new generation of loud and rowdy children that have kept it just as messy and disorderly, just as my siblings and I have.

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At one point, I realized that did not want to continue to photograph my family.   I felt left out whenever something was going on.  After so many years of photographing my family and the mundane life, I decided to photograph the space itself.  I still wanted to maintain the essence of the individual within the space.  Most of the photographs were taken either before or after an event.  This way the beds are either neatly made or disorganized.  The evidence of the essence of the individuals are evident by finding the smudges on the bathroom mirror, the unmade beds, the dirt on the walls in the hallway, my niece’s pillow pet on the bed, the hole in the ceiling that my mother made in order to find where the leak was coming from and so on.  The small details are things that I cling to but will no longer be there when I go home