Artist statement

Upon arriving from Germany to live and work in the United States almost two years ago, I was shocked at how the America of my imagination—a place where everyone is well-educated and privileged— proved instead a place with a great deal of poverty, and despair. My experiences here fueled my desire to sharpen public awareness of the need to further understand social inequity. Building on my long-term interest in social documentary photography, I set out to find a subject that allowed me to reflect on these issues.

My work focuses on Jennifer, a second-generation Puerto Rican woman, her Native American life partner David, and their four children in South Providence, Rhode Island. South Providence is an urban neighborhood with a large African-American and Hispanic population. In this area, many families live well below the poverty line due to unemployment along with some of the highest percentages of foreclosure in the country.

My photographs and video of Jennifer’s family, captured over the past year, represent authentic emotional and personal moments in everyday life. They illustrate how the twenty-five-year-old mother, in spite of difficult living conditions, poverty, desolation, and illness, manages to maintain an optimistic disposition while thoroughly caring for her children. She lives in pursuit of her American Dream, hosting birthday parties and hopes that one day she will own a home.

These images were photographed without moral judgments. My photographs are meant to combat stereotypes about disadvantaged families, and to provide a stage that encourages an in-depth understanding of their daily struggle. I selected intimate views of family life to ask the audience to feel something, ideally empathy, in response to Jennifer and her family.