When I started photographing homes as a real estate photographer, I found myself in communities across southern Illinois and rural Missouri that were new to me. After shoots, I ventured a little further into small towns, pulled off the road to look closer at sites, and took more photographs of the properties. This began a documentary project about housing. I mostly photograph homes owned by banks that had been foreclosed. Being in the homes lost by the prior owners for one reason or another became a way to examine issues of affordable housing and what kind of housing we value as Americans. By photographing these single-family homes, I see the lives of the working and middle class families in an economy that does not serve them. In some ways, it is a landscape project-the landscape and architecture of middle America- what we have built; what we have left behind.
