Cairo Homes, from the series Promised Land

Shot primarily on miniature instant film, this project portrays images of homes built in my father’s hometown Cairo , Illinois at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers and is a mythological place in my family’s collective memory. Cairo’s rich historical past has made this city famous, written about around the world. After a twenty year absence, I visited Cairo and was struck by the abandoned town that I visited often as a child. I set out to find my grandmother’s home as my first step in documenting some of the remaining homes, some abandoned, some not, unintentionally capturing the beauty of this southern River town that lost its luster long ago.