Arbus A. No Place Like Home

Doubleday, 1986. — 130 p.This is a book of Americans at home. The portraits were taken in five cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and Albuquerque. With the exception of three, all the photographs were made in a year.The people in this book have homes unlike anyone else's. Some of them live in buildings that were not originally homes at all; others have transformed their houses into looking like something else; and still others share their homes with an inordinate number of possessions. Some of these people are still living in the homes they were born in, while others keep moving from one to the next. Not all of them have their own; sometimes they live in someone else's. Nevertheless, they are quite attached to them. Their homes are as demanding as children, as consoling as parents, and as intimate as lovers.People are always in the process of making homes, but most of them are never finished. They tend to change them the way they do their clothes, as if they were changing their self-image. Everybody needs one.