A Picture of Structural Pain: Visualizations of the Housing Crisis

This article analyzes photographs of the housing crisis made by award-winning photojournalist Anthony Suau in 2008. I argue that they function as what Zelizer has called “second-order-images,” photographs that lack a human subject but still mark the crisis. While second-order images can allow trauma to be blunted or mask suffering, I contend they also invite exploration of the suffering of a new subject. In the case of the U.S. housing crisis, that new subject often was a house depicted as victim. The photographs and their accompanying text position the houses as the victim in the story of the housing crisis. Suau’s photographs help us understand the housing crisis, even while the solutions remain ambiguous, by communicating the problem differently.