Kathleen Tunnell Handel

Kathleen Tunnell Handel is a photographer engaged in a long-term research based investigation of the affordable housing subgenre of mobile home and manufactured housing communities. Her immersive project “Where the Heart Is: Portraits from Vernacular American Trailer and Mobile Home Parks” includes images from communities, to date, within Maine, California, New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Texas, Oregon, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Colorado.

Tunnell Handel’s extensive research, conversations and recorded interviews with park residents and managers, and collaboration with related professionals, scholars, and housing advocates, all continue to inform her photographic work and her growing advocacy for affordable housing.

Tunnell Handel’s earlier studies in observational and systems based life sciences at Cornell University, through her exploration of the visual arts and being awarded a BFA in Textile Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, to ongoing studies of photography, have all contributed to her deep interest in visual culture and themes of memory, life systems, and the human experience.

Her work is held in private and institutional collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art. A self-published catalog of the 2021 solo exhibition of Where the Heart Is at the Griffin Museum of Photography includes a foreword by former Executive Director and Curator Paula Tognarelli, with an expanded essay focused on the work by the artist. Tunnell Handel lives in NYC and the Berkshires of MA and photographs widely.

With housing availability and eviction rates at crisis levels, Where the Heart Is: Portraits from Vernacular American Trailer and Mobile Home Parks investigates this largest form of unsubsidized American affordable housing. My ongoing collaboration challenges the ingrained stereotyping of the estimated 20 million Americans who live in manufactured housing (as stigmatized trailer and mobile homes are being rebranded) while revealing what’s rapidly being lost.

This project is informed by research into areas like the American Dream, zoning, and demographics as relates to the manufactured housing “umbrella”. Conversations and interviews with park residents, and collaboration with professionals involved in related academic fields and housing advocacy, expand the voices and viewpoints of the accompanying narrative.

I am especially drawn to the confined yards and entryways around homes where individual choices in ornamentation and landscaping, despite or often due to limited financial resources, express the personality of the unseen occupants. Portraits of individual homes are also visually classified and constructed into a library of typology grids, archiving differences and commonalities within and across communities and states.

I began Where the Heart Is in 2017, with travel to date within ten states throughout the United States, and continue to photograph and record video interviews with mobile and manufactured housing community residents.