Between 1975 and 1976, John Schott hauled an 8×10-inch Deardorff view camera through mobile home parks across California. The subject was postwar westward migration as it hardened into architecture: factory-built houses, aluminum siding, trimmed lawns, and the lettering and ornament that marked each unit as someone’s own. The work came after Schott’s 1973–74 photographs of Route 66 motels, which were included in the New Topographics exhibition at George Eastman House in 1975, and it continues that inquiry under a different roof.
Schott’s preface describes an iconography that manufacturers standardized and residents then personalized. From a surrounding hillside, the parks read as arabesques of uniform aluminum boxes; up close, they disclose an abundance of individual touches, a domestic vocabulary of aspirations and memories carried west. What the book documents is therefore not simply retirement housing or cheap construction but the moment a mass-produced object is made to hold a life. The view camera’s slowness suits this: these are exacting descriptions of settled ground, not snapshots of mobility, and the plates register the longing for both individuality and community that the exteriors announce.
The subject sits at the intersection of postwar retirement migration, the remaking of the western built environment, and photography’s turn from romantic landscape toward the man-altered scene. The Route 66 motel pictures, not the mobile home work, were the ones shown in New Topographics, but the concerns carry over. Schott’s photographs are held by institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, The George Eastman House, and the Fogg Art Museum. The book’s interest is that it asks how a type becomes a home, and how a photograph can hold the difference.
Nazraeli Press issued the volume in 2015 as a slipcased hardcover of 64 pages, with 54 duotone plates and a preface by the photographer. A coherent body of mid-1970s topographical work, made with unusual technical discipline and given a considered book form, is the substance of the volume.
