Looking at / Looking with Public Housing Residents in 1990s Chicago: Shifting the Stigma of Place-Based Visibility in Social-Spatial Images

This article focuses on the visual workings of space as stigma in the place-based visibility of public housing residents in Chicago in the 1990s. By analyzing the production and discussion of images by outsiders and insiders in various media (the local press, a video press-release, an early blog), it considers the decayed surfaces of housing projects as both fact and representation – in other words, as exploitable visible material. By contrasting mechanisms for looking at residents through space, and mechanisms for looking at the same space with residents, it aims at a clearer understanding of the subject/object and figure/ground equations that determine deeply ingrained readings of “the poor in their housing.”