Field Notes : Rooms, Roads & Revelations

BOOKS

Field Notes: Rooms, Roads & Revelations is an intimate companion to Extended Stay. Travel alongside Karen Lippowiths, a 20+ year veteran photographer, as she lives in low-budget motels and documents this shadow housing world across 7,000 miles, 13 states, 30 cities, and nine months.

Through photographs, roadside stories, moments of humor, and unguarded reflections, Lippowiths recounts the experiences, questions, and encounters that gave rise to and shape the project. She also offers an inside look at her approach to documentary photography and the challenges of building an ambitious, long-form body of work and immersive exhibition.

Part journal, part visual record, and part personal reckoning, Field Notes: Rooms, Roads & Revelations explores the uncertainty, fear, pain, hope, absurdity, and unexpected human connections found in the people and places she encounters along the way.

This self-published, 160-page, full-color paperback includes 37 original photographs and is priced at $50. Each purchase generates a modest profit that helps sustain Lippowiths's continued fieldwork, travel, reporting, and development of the larger project and its upcoming 2027 immersive exhibition.

“An unflinching witness to housing’s human cost.”
- Steven Rimmer
Director, Detroit Tenants Union

“Required reading for anyone who believes housing matters.”
- Donovan McCarty
Director, Housing Justice Clinic, Michigan State University