Living Room, San Francisco 2017/2018

Jana Sophia Nolle’s photo series Living Room (2017/2018) document temporary homeless shelters recreated from materials found in the street and erected in various affluent living rooms in San Francisco. In developing the project, Nolle worked with unhoused persons to understand how their improvised dwellings were constructed. After establishing these relationships, and with the permission of the unhoused individuals, Nolle approached wealthy people for permission to reconstruct these shelters and photograph them in their homes. Nolle remarks that “the photographs are an inventory, a typology of improvised dwellings, cataloging their various attributes.” While aesthetically striking, Nolle’s photographs also “touch on larger phenomena of socio-political changes, housing shortages, exclusion and gentrification going far beyond San Francisco. How much is our home, whether house or tent, the determining factor for selecting our social group? How much does being homeless define somebody who might also be intelligent, creative and social?”