The Valley Issue

It is telling that the photos in Ezagirre are of houses and not of homes as in Graham. If Homes for America told the story told the story of the American middle-class family, it is uprooting from dialect and custom and its ambition to establish the interiority of the home in a bland and conformal environment, then Ezagirre tells the same story from the perspective of a community that is trying to convince itself of its continuing togetherness and shared values as expressed through its difficulties with translating to itself what significance the forms of its inherited culture might still have. Seen in the perspective of the planetary petty bourgeoisie, then, Ezagirre’s could have been of houses pretty much anywhere. The way Basque house is situated in between the idea of an original identity and the suburb resonates in what Robert Smithon wrote about the suburb existing „without a rational past and without ‚the big events’, of history“, thus becoming a negative utopia fulfilling the economic destiny of the post-modern monument.“