In 1988, photographer Sandy Sorlien set out on a series of journeys to document the rich architectural heritage that America is losing to the cheap and banal design aesthetic of tract housing, strip malls, and big-box stores. Her seven-year odyssey took her over 90,000 miles of back roads to every state in the Union in search of homes that reflect and define the region in which they stand. After making over a thousand "house portraits", Sorlien has chosen one representative image from each state and collected them in this volume. Shot with black-and-white infrared film, the homes captured through Sorlien's lens range from the grand to the humble, from the historic to the commonplace. Included here are a classic saltbox in Newtown, Connecticut; the House on the Rocks in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay; a mobile home in Bushnell, Florida; a Stick-style folk Victorian in Biloxi, Mississippi; a limestone cottage in Fredericksburg, Texas; a false-front house in Rollins, Montana; a log cabin in Dubois, Wyoming; an adobe dwelling in Sante Fe, New Mexico; and a platform tent in Healy, Alaska.
Each image is accompanied by a vignette from Sorlien's road journal, offering details of the house depicted, its owners and history, other houses in the region, or her travel experiences in the state. At a time when America's architectural landscape is being homogenized by suburban sprawl, when the outskirts of Anchorage and Oklahoma City look no different from those of Tucson, Jacksonville, and Salt Lake City, this is both a visual record of regional domestic architecture and an elegiac meditation on the changing American landscape.
- ISBN10 0801870623
- ISBN13 9780801870620
- Publish Date 26 December 2002
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 26 June 2014
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 136
- Language English