2009 Rhyen Coombs

As the economy started to spiral downward in 2008, the cause and results of home foreclosures — and the stories of the people affected by them — were spotlighted in the media. But what can the vacated structures themselves tell us about the people who lived in them? Rhyen Coombs began photographing the interiors of empty houses to see what happens to a property after it has been foreclosed.

“This is a hard subject to cover,” she says. “I worry that we’ve seen so many headlines about it that we’ve stop noticing.”

The photographs Coombs took of abandoned possessions in a Vallejo, Calif., home following foreclosure have earned her the 2009 Dorothea Lange Fellowship. Coombs, a 27-year-old graduate student pursuing a master’s degree at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, plans to use the fellowship’s $4,000 grant to purchase a digital camera and other photographic tools to continue her project, “Foreclosed.”

With the aid of the Lange Fellowship, Coombs will continue the project after graduate school and document the story over a longer time. “I didn’t have the resources to do that,” she says, adding that the staff at the journalism school has been generous in lending her equipment.

Her winning photographs represent a portion of her master’s project — Coombs has also collected sounds of clean-up crews as they gather and dispose of left-behind items from foreclosed houses. By coupling the sound and photography in audio slide shows, she hopes to bring alive the aftermath of foreclosure.

“There’s a lot of noise associated with the process,” she explains, noting that only a narrow timeframe exists between the residents’ departure and the arrival of a bank’s clean-up teams at a vacated home.

Coombs’ search for foreclosed houses also took her to Stockton, Calif., which Forbes magazine named as one of America’s 10 most miserable cities in 2009. “I drove through entire neighborhoods that were completely abandoned,” she recalls.

Coombs grew up in south Texas in McAllen, a city near the Mexican border in the Rio Grande Valley. She earned a B.A. at UC Davis, where she worked as a copyeditor for the school newspaper and majored in anthropology. After graduation, she moved to Portland, Ore., where she lived for four years, working as associate editor for World Pulse, a local magazine, before coming to Berkeley.

She only began taking photographs in graduate school. When she was learning to report stories, she found herself first responding to visual and aural details. “Photography lets me express the way I perceive a story on a very intuitive level,” explains Coombs, who considers herself a multimedia journalist. “I can communicate better that way, and often photographs resonate more with people than words do.

“Photography feels like a more natural way of communicating what I see,” she says.

Photo Gallery

Empty room

Rack with hangers

Room with bed

Box of bundled letters

Wall with pinned items - one is falling off

Empty room with trash on the floor

Kitchen sink with plants on window sill

Yellow phone on wall with light switch

Project Proposal

Upon foreclosure, people leave behind more than a house. They leave a home, and the remnants of a life, littering the carpet with a trail of items abandoned in the end to the bank, the lender, the creditor, to be dismantled and tossed away in preparation for the next occupants.

What makes people leave behind what they once deemed worth hoarding, even treasuring? In the abandoned space between four walls lies a metaphor for loss, and for what we as a society value. Especially as our economy falters and Americans are forced to abandon habits of materialism on credit, the objects and spaces we leave behind in crisis speak to who we are and where we are going.

The photo essay I have submitted for the Dorothea Lange Fellowship represents my first photos that turn a lens on life through its remnants. I encountered these images in Fall 2008 in the foreclosed home of an immigrant family in a working class neighborhood in Vallejo, Calif.

I began this project in September 2008 and plan to complete it by December 2009. I propose to expand my scope beyond the Bay Area to document homes in other parts of rural and urban California hit hard by foreclosure.

The final result will be a series of images documenting three additional foreclosed homes, each offering a distinct window into the lives of its occupants, the things they valued, and the choices they made when leaving those lives and things behind. The series will be printed and bound in a book, as well as reproduced online as an intimate package of documentary audio-slideshows, based on the sounds I capture as an audio record of each space.

Rhyen Coombs
November 2008