Joan Klatchko

Coming Home: Levittown Revisited

Green lawns. Tupperware parties. Trips to the mall in the big boxy car: this was my suburbia, the one stored away in memory all those years I lived abroad.

T.S. Eliot wrote that "...at the end of all our exploring, (we) will arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time." But after 21 years abroad, I was only able to do this through photography. Using the suburban setting as the theme - and not the backdrop - I used my camera to explore the lives of ordinary American people - including family, friends and neighbors. These are not people who live on the margins of society, but rather, those who inhabit that vast, almost mythical place we call suburbia - and my pictures reveal that moment of drama inherent within the most ordinary situations. In response to the criticism heaped upon the identical rows of "ticky-tacky" houses, my pictures show home renovation as a means of self-expression, and holiday decoration as a form of public art.

Only though photography was I able to get behind the facade of cliché, to that subtle and complex place we call "home," a place that is an integral part of the American psyche. And because Levittown is, in many ways, a microcosm of America, this project became a way for me to rediscover my own home.