a house is not a home

Sometime in the fall of 2020, while we were all in the midst of pandemic-inspired life reassessments, we moved my parents out of their house. This was the house where they had been living for 50 years, where my sister and I were raised, in the town which was our home base for my entire childhood. Although I had not lived there for many decades now, their house was still home. It was *our* house. Decades of memories lived in the smells, the way the light fell in different rooms, the faint hum of the freeway, the not-quite-in-tune piano. And in the stuff. 50 years of stuff: evidence of travel, of learning… proof of a life lived.

After months of sorting through things, taking some, donating some, and disposing of so much, we emptied the house and made a final move. As we exited the door for the last time, it felt odd… this was a place I had *only* known as our home, after all, since I was a small child, yet we’d never be there again.

Fast forward to today. My parents are settled in a new house, next to my sister. I’m there all the time now, since it’s close by. There’s a new dining table where we all gather for meals. There’s familiar art on the walls. The smells of Chinese cooking are starting to linger. And everyone is there. What started as an empty, sterile house, has become home. 

And so this is where the series “a house is not a home” started. Home, to me, is wherever we all are, whether that’s our family, our extended family, our family of friends, our pets, our stuff, or even just ourselves. I wondered as we left the old house whether we’d find new roots. But in the end, it was just a house. We left the old house behind, but “home” came with us.

Archival Pigment Print | 16” x 16”, 24” x 24”

EXHIBITS

2023
40th Center Annual, 6/23-8/20, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX 

2022
Comeback: 8th Annual LACP Members' Exhibition, Los Angeles Center of Photography, Online
28th Annual Juried Members Show, 7/7-9/4, Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA
2022 Members' Juried Exhibition, 4/9-5/8, Center for Photographic Arts, Carmel, CA
Conversations with the Archive, 4/1-4/30, SE Center for Photography, Greenville, SC