untitled by Jenny Pfeiffer
In recent months, images of foreclosed homes, unfinished houses, and emptied-out businesses have filled newspapers and magazines. Areas hardest hit by the foreclosure crises, like the Midwestern cities of Cleveland and Detroit, are often looked to as the most striking examples of mass abandon, but suburbs and cities in every state are facing the same types of devastation.
Hey, Hot Shot! contender Jenny Pfeiffer, an Oakland-based artist and photographer, looks at foreclosure in a housing development in Tracy, CA.
She writes,
Only about half of the new homes were completed and the open space created an unnerving atmosphere. I wanted to capture both the high expectations of the neighborhood yet also the sadness of living without neighbors. Regardless of the barren landscape, the new settlers are still trying to make this place their home. They take care of their yards but at the property line they stop and go no further. They have moved to Tracy for space and a sense of community, yet it feels like they are out there all alone.
Pfeiffer looks at the homes in Tracy from the exterior, showing the vast emptiness of undeveloped plots of land and residents alone in their supposedly growing communities.
Her work evokes thoughts of several other projects we have come across on the web that help us visualize the housing crises and the recession. Photographer Todd Hido, who exhibited work at Jen Bekman Gallery in A New American Portrait, creates images of foreclosed homes' interiors, with marked eerieness to their emptiness. Brian Ulrich, a Midwestern-er who also exhibited in the same show, photographed the series Stores That Are No More for Time, where the carcasses of familiar stores lay empty and in overgrowth.
Perhaps what is distressing about all these images--Pfeiffer's, Hido's, and Ulrich's--is that they are devoid of people, their only residue left behind in the form of worn carpets, empty driveways, and abandoned shopping carts. They suggest that our physical toll on the world, in the form of houses and businesses, is not so easily erased even when we have departed these spaces, and forces us to think about having a greater conscientiousness about the places we occupy and create.