“While you might say of some people in America today that they are their jobs, with the people that I met in mobile homes, they are their homes,” Frimmel Smith says, describing the subjects of her documentary project on mobile homes and their owners. “Kingston Blemiss, a stockbroker in Mississippi, has the most beautiful white double-wide house flying the American flag–he looks like Mr. Solid Citizen. I first noticed the home of David Reed in Colorado because it had seven antique cars out in front. He has 21 antique clocks on the wall inside and auto mechanic’s equipment in the second bedroom.” Charles and Mary Keim live just outside Chicago in a mobile home decorated inside and out with “antiques” others have discarded; a photograph shows a lawn jockey and pink flamingos. Addie Pearson, a onetime Chicagoan who’s now retired in one of the poorest towns in Mississippi, lives elegantly in a home that has a Victorian living room and a big sunken bathtub. Her home sits on her father’s land next to his house, which he built himself after he quit sharecropping for life in town as a housepainter.
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Smith’s project, an exhibit called “Wheel People,” got its start several years ago when she had dinner with Dianne Pilgrim, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Design. Pilgrim was talking about a planned exhibit of “uniquely American designs,” and the first thought to pop into Smith’s head was mobile homes. Pilgrim thought it was a great idea and suggested a book. But Smith wanted to put together a traveling exhibit. When the grants came through (including one from Chicago’s Graham Foundation), Smith spent two years identifying sites to be photographed, traveling 15,000 miles via Amtrak and rented cars. The resulting exhibit includes about 20 panel-mounted digital prints that combine photographs of homes and their owners with texts that quote them. Smith, a journalist, among other things, had Andrew Radigan take the photos, though she often decided on their content and composition.
Smith noticed certain regional differences. In Mississippi, which has few zoning laws, mobile homes could be interspersed with houses. In the south owners often attached screened porches to their mobile homes, and in states such as Maine they built “snow load additions”–steeply pitched roofs over the entryways. In Indiana Smith encountered “Uncle Bob,” whose trailer was “completely rimmed in hay bales” for insulation instead of the metal skirting usually used to hide the wheels.
