Kelly Creedon worked as a print and radio journalist in Central America before deciding to pursue a passion for photography back home. In 2008, her interests led her to start documenting the foreclosure crisis in Boston, an ongoing project that’s evolved into a multimedia documentary exhibit, “We Shall Not Be Moved,” currently touring Massachusetts.
Kelly Creedon
Title: Independent documentary photographer and producer
Age: 34
Experience: Three years following the foreclosure crisis
How did you get interested in foreclosure as a subject in the first place?
I actually had a background in journalism. I had worked in El Salvador for five years, and got really interested in photography. I came back to the States in ’08 [to study photography] and was interested in using those skills and plugging back into the communities I had been working with. [After doing a photo-essay for WBUR that involved a member of the housing advocacy group City Life], I approached them and said, “hey, I’m really interested in figuring out how to tell this story in a bigger way.” I just had the sense that this wasn’t a story you could tell in one day; the cases evolve over so much time. … I wanted to learn more about what led up to these very tense moments, this showdown in front of someone’s house where people are chaining themselves to the steps – what was the story behind that?
And how did that lead to the exhibit?
The first year I was essentially doing the project on my own time, since I didn’t have much funding, and doing other work as well. But in the second year, I got a grant from Mass Humanities, and … the money to pay for a little bit of my time and to print the photos. … I just got another grant to make this exhibit and bring it around.
Tell me a little more about the exhibit, and your subjects. How did you pick what to highlight?
The way I’ve organized it, you’re looking at individual stories. I tried to do a balance of portraits and moments of action … [This woman] and her husband got in trouble with their mortgage when they were supporting a family member who had cancer. They were trying to get a modification, sending in paperwork and not getting a response. They got divorced over the stress, and now she’s fighting to keep the home on her own… She is a leader of the local tenant movement which is fighting back after foreclosure. … Another subject, David … lost his job of 17 years in the public sector due to budget cuts, and was out of work for close to a year, and, in the meantime, Bank of America foreclosed on his house. Now, he’s employed full-time again … but because of where they are in the process Bank of America is still moving forward with the eviction. … Another family who are tenants in a foreclosed property … they’ve just been struggling, trying to figure out: “Are we going to be able to stay? Is the bank going to evict us?” …They’ve been able to stay so far, but they find it difficult to get the bank to deal with the property. The water goes out, their front door was broken for a while.
You said a lot of your subjects have already been foreclosed on?
That’s the majority of the stories, people who have already been foreclosed on. Rather than trying to stop the foreclosure, they wait until it happens and they try to deal with the bank after foreclosure rather than deal with the inflated balance of the original loan…. City Life and some of the organizing groups are putting a lot of their energy into fighting the banks after foreclosure. … So far, the banks haven’t been buying that argument. But that’s the argument they’re trying to make: Why throw this family out and spend the money on the foreclosure and the eviction and finding a new buyer and increasing the glut of properties that are abandoned and in disrepair?
You’ve been following this topsy-turvy foreclosure world for almost three years now. What’s been most surprising to you?
What had really caught my attention was the process people go through as they become involved [with City Life]. People go through this traumatic moment of feeling really guilty, feeling like they’ve made this huge mistake and they can’t tell anyone about it, and it’s so terrible. They’re going to lose their house, and they feel really ashamed and terrible, and that they’re all alone. And then people get connected to this movement and start talking to other people and realizing [that there are a lot of people in the same boat].
Obviously, this crisis has been going on for a really long time. Do you anticipate you’ll still be working on this project for the next year or two?
Well, I’ve got this plan over the next six months or so to travel to several other cities [in Massachusetts with the exhibit]. And … this movement isn’t just in Springfield and Lawrence and Boston. It’s also in Chicago and L.A., and New York….Obviously, this issue isn’t going away. And I’ve had a really great reaction to the work, where it feels like it’s answering some different questions for people. So, I’m looking for opportunities to get it out there, whether that’s bringing the work to other places or distributing it online.
