Thirty years ago, foreclosed homes were not nearly as common as they are today. The economy has turned upside down in my lifetime. Since I was a child and throughout my parent's marriage, my mom and dad purchased and renovated foreclosed homes to resell for profit. I have been a part of these processes and have gathered my own thoughts based on my experiences of this subject matter.
Within my own family and during my lifetime, I have experienced the thick and thin of life, and I have been caught in a division of economic classes, the poor and the upper-middle class. My parents have been divorced for 10 years now. Our family home was sold in only two short months. My mother found and purchased a foreclosed home, which only required a basic cleaning and paint job before moving in. She has since purchased a few additional houses, which were foreclosed and needed more work. With the help of our contractor we have rehabilitated these homes and now rent them out. In contrast, while my father went between living in apartments and renting a duplex, he was able to save enough money for a down payment and financing for a new home to be built. In less than a year his new home construction was finished and at this time, I moved in with him. Four years later, he suddenly lost his job and things started going downhill from there. He found another job but only worked there for a little over a year before they let him go. At the age of 63 and after trying for a year to find work to keep up with all the bills, the bank finally started sending letters, which began his foreclosure process. After losing his home a year later, he retired, moved to Arizona and is living with his brother.
I wanted to document the all too common struggles, and the even worse realities which many American families are still going through. The times are tough right now but no one seems to want to talk about it. I want to show the heartache, the hopelessness, and the lifelessness of this epidemic. This series features the insides and outsides of foreclosed homes, homeless people on the streets, and other signs of this “economic crisis.” A range of depths of field will be used but mostly deep depths between f 18 and F22 for maximum visual impact and raw gritty details. I am utilizing digital color photography to show that these are indeed the current conditions of our country, not historical scenes from our past. For this body of work, I am inspired by other photographers such as Dorothea Lange, a 1930’s depression era photojournalist and documentary photographer and Walker Evans, also a depression era photographer.
