Eve Morgenstern’s photographic work is a methodological analysis of urban sites across the country and their architectural past. In this particular body of work she explores the American cities of Detroit, Michigan and Oakland, California where the architecture and stability of the home is under duress. In these cities, the idea of home as sanctuary is being destabilized due to the current foreclosure crises and also to more enduring pressures of economics, racial politics and white flight, and deindustrialization - all of which are having disturbing effects on the urban center. Across the country these forms of abandonment are pervasive and spreading.



Morgenstern is interested in the fragility of domestic architecture in these landscapes. Here the house does not represent the American dream of belonging and security but of uncertainty and loss - a loss of identity and of specific personal histories both past and future. She looks for traces of human presence in these vacated sites through a process of careful examination and amplification. Through isolation and specificity she hopes to reveal layers of complex narratives in these spaces - spaces that exist as markers and remnants of the cause of their decline. Her process of documenting these structures is both a kind of preservation and an attempt to bear witness to the facts of what happened there.