Soren Spicknall is a photographer, researcher, and alleywalker based in Chicago, IL. He’s currently putting together a photo series based on interviews with families who installed metal awnings on their homes monogrammed with their family initial, a practice common in the mid-20th century.
Soren’s family moved several times during his childhood, “but the longest we stayed in one place was when we lived in a little early 20th century bungalow in a town outside Detroit. It was built as a caretaker’s cottage for a defunct church camp located on an island in a small lake, but the island had just been subdivided when we moved in, and my family lived there while the little house became surrounded by much larger custom suburban homes built by families much wealthier than ours.”
He sees himself as a summer person, “because I dislike the unpredictability of spring or fall and despise the inhospitability of winter, but even in summer I prefer a mild, room temperature evening over heat.”
A few years ago, a laundromat Soren used to go to burned down. “It was the first time in my life that a place I had keen memory of had not just been altered, but had been totally erased. Its irretrievability, rather than anything in particular about the space itself, is what makes me want to experience it again.”
