All You Can Lose is Your Heart
If you look closely enough at certain neighborhoods in Western American cities, you will find, dotted throughout the urbanized desert and high plains, small constellations of what are called “storybook ranch houses.” One of those constellations is in the desert city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, my home.
Although I ultimately photographed houses employing elements of this storybook ranch style in Nevada, Oklahoma, and California, my interest in these houses began in Albuquerque, where polite modern bungalows with chalet-like faces clearly stand in contradiction to their desert setting.
My photographs engage both with notions of the “ideal” American home and modern realities facing Western middle-class families.
Over time, a wash of owners and renters have made changes both minor and major to the homes. In each case the exterior now reflects something of the people living inside. In this way, the photographs of the houses come to stand in as metaphorical family portraits.
Observing the houses nearly 60 years after they were built allows us to see how the vision behind them, and the American model they advanced, has played out sociologically. By looking at this model from the past, we are assisted in imagining how we might literally and figuratively construct our notions of “home” in the future.
KayLynn Deveney
