ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, November 12, 1996 TAG: 9611120126
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
The lady with the Elvis lamp doesn't live here anymore.
Carol Burch-Brown doesn't know where she's gone.
"She's an artist," said Burch-Brown, whose photos captured the young woman in her Blacksburg trailer with a collection of 300 key chains, 40 Avon bottles, Elvis memorabilia and an assortment of dolls.
The woman used her small, boxy home as a canvas, displaying the objects in every available space. But th e park she lived in is empty now; an old gravel road and a few concrete slabs mark what was once a jumble of trailers a few blocks from downtown.
"I don't know what happened to her," said Burch-Brown, who included the photos in "Trailers," a new book rooted in Montgomery County's mobile dwellings.
Burch-Brown, an associate professor of art in Virginia Tech's Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, finds the transience unsettling. Trailer people often own their homes, but not the land they sit on, she said. Some of the structures, reinforced with tin and aluminum siding, have hitches attached to the back. "If the owner of the land decides to develop, the owner of the trailer has to move on."
A few of the people the photographer visited between 1983 and 1990 have died. Some have moved away and would be difficult to track down. And sometimes Burch-Brown wants to keep that creative distance. But not with the Elvis lamp lady, who arranged and rearranged her assorted collections before every visit.
The Tech professor has never lived in a trailer. But her father was a minister, and as a child, she traveled with her parents from one small parish to another. "I can recall not having that fixed sense of location," she said. What she had instead was "that sense of making due, which people who live in trailers have, I think. There was a connection."
Burch-Brown had always eyed the trailers she passed along the roads of Montgomery County, had always wondered about the people inside. In 1983, she explored the Roanoke Street trailer park that was once near the heart of Blacksburg, across the street from the town's largest cemetery. It was the first of many trips she would make over the next seven years to visit with and photograph the people who lived in area trailer parks and in the trailers that stood alone, protected by the broad shoulders of the Appalachians.
At the time, Burch-Brown called it a "project" - not a book, not an art exhibit. The project grew.
"Trailers" hit bookstores at the end of September, though the official release date was Oct. 30. Many of the photos will be on display in January at a small New York gallery on 14th Street.
"The thing that really got me, emotionally and creatively, was riding through the Appalachian countryside and seeing that combination of visual beauty, the variety of income levels, the ways of living," Burch-Brown said. "The old falling-down shacks that are so picturesque, with smoke rising from the chimney - they look poor, but they look quaint. They invoke a sympathetic reaction from observers."
The people in trailers are in the same economic situation, "but there's an attitude of disdain, of `Oh, those people have no taste.'''
Visually, she said, "trailers are just hard to digest." The middle class has deemed them "ugly and unsafe."
"If you live in something people think is ugly and easy to get rid of, you're not living in a safe place," Burch-Brown said.
She takes issue with the "ugly" label. She is fascinated by the trailer's symmetry, the way people use the small spaces allotted to them.
A photograph of a windowsill, lined with shot glasses and airplane bottles of liquor in perfect order, still makes her smile. "She's making a joke," she said of the woman who arranged the display.
According to the 1990 U.S. Census, more than 3,700 Montgomery County families made their homes in trailers, up from 2,700 in 1980. Many of the newer trailers are probably what's known commonly today as "manufactured housing," particularly doublewides, said an official with the New River Valley Planning Commission. The 1990 census showed just over 700 mobile homes in less-rural Roanoke County, and some 150,000 mobile homes in Virginia, which accounts for 6 percent of the state's housing.
David Rigsbee, who wrote the essay accompanying Burch-Brown's photos, said they approached their book with one idea: "What if we looked at this as if no one had ever spoken about trailers before, or had a prejudice against them before? I think the main thing we wanted to do was collapse the distinction between high and low American culture. It's just American culture - particularly in the American South."
Rigsbee's cousins grew up in a trailer, and his family owned a vacation trailer on Topsail Island off the North Carolina coast. "I tried to spend a lot of time there, to understand what it is to be inside of a shoebox - to grow to love the shoebox," he said. "I don't think I could have loved it better than if it were an A-frame hanging out over the ocean."
He speaks of the trailer, which his parents gave him and his wife as a wedding gift last year, in the past tense.
Hurricane Fran destroyed the dwelling as "Trailers" was printing. "It got covered by the ocean, a total washout," Rigsbee said. "It made me want to rewrite the book."
In "Trailers" he wrote - cavalierly, he believes now - of the dangers that plague these foundationless homes: ``[T]ornadoes are famous, not to say tiresome, in displaying their skill at spinning trailers into the air and spilling their contents like shelled peas."
His next trailer will most likely be an RV, he said, something he can move out of harm's way.
RVs, mobile homes, manufactured dwellings - all are specific names for the units more commonly known as trailers.
Rigsbee said he and Burch-Brown chose "Trailers" for their book instead of the '90s terms because it was the most basic. "We wanted to unmask the euphemisms," he said. "The people who despise trailers are not the people who live in them."
Some of the people in Burch-Brown's photographs were quite content with their living situations; others wanted to move on.
One person longed for a slightly bigger space - perhaps a doublewide.
Burch-Brown's forays into people's trailers were depressing and uplifting, depending on the lives she touched. She tried to keep herself out of her work, she said, to let the photograph tell the story. To be honest.
"It's almost like when you go up to someone in your family and say `Can I take your picture?''' she said. "I tried to take everything at face value."
But in the preface she lets slip some of the memories behind the pictures. "A father holds his baby under a scene of the Last Supper; his kitchen is filled with the dialysis equipment necessary to keep him alive. An elderly couple seated beneath hunting trophies recount the story of their four children who had polio."
Before this project, Burch-Brown used to paint large, abstract works, backdrops for stories by Kafka or poems by Rilke - "heavy-duty, serious work," she said.
Now her works are smaller, contained.
Photography gave her a way to start dealing with people in her art, and the objects in their lives.
"This project changed my life," she said.
TRAILER-DWELLERS' VIEWS
Carol Burch-Brown wanted the photographs in "Trailers" to speak for themselves. They were taken between 1983 and 1990 at trailers within a 10-mile radius of Montgomery County. Here is what some local people say about their lives in mobile homes today.
* ``We've lived here for about eight years," said Esther Long, who shares a mobile home with her husband, Ralph. "They weren't making them double back when we bought it."
The best thing about a mobile home? "Everything's convenient, I can say that," she said. "You can go from one room right into the other."
The Longs have a corner lot at Ramey's Mobile Home Park in Salem. Spring puts leaves on the shrubbery, summer brings flowers, and the yard isn't too hard to keep up, she said.
* Paul and Barbara Arnold also live at Ramey's, but they're looking for a house. A recent stroke put Paul Arnold in a wheelchair, and "it's pretty tight quarters," he said.
He had a wheelchair ramp added to the mobile home, but he said he needs a house for more elbow room.
* Lisa Saul has lived in Salem Village Mobile Home Park for the past few years with her mother.
The space seems a little small sometimes, she said, and the mobile home is situated near Mason Creek. "We have to clean the yard every time it floods. We're looking for something different."
* Ellen and Ronald Reed lived in a mobile home when they were first married. Now they're living in one again, Abbott Mobile Home Park just outside New Castle.
"I'm a very organized person, and everything has to be in a certain place in a mobile home," Ellen Reed said. "The taxes are low, and it's more our style. We're economical people. We don't like to be in debt $100,000."
Reed said she keeps her home neat and has trees in the back yard. From there, it's a short walk to the mountains. "We like the outdoors and the country." Her mobile home, she said, puts her closer to it.
LENGTH: Long : 168 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. GENE DALTON Staff. "Trailers" photographer andby CNBVirginia Tech faculty member Carol Burch-Brown visits a New River
Valley mobile-home park. 2. Cover of "Trailers." color. 3. "Trailer
Interior with E-Z Chair" by Carol Burch-Brown. 4. Detail from
"Juanita in Front of Her Trailer" (above) and 5. "Three Boys"
(right), both photographed in the late 1980s in Montgomery County
trailer parks by Carol Burch-Brown. 6. "The lady with the Elvis
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