Field Notes : AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY

** AVAILABLE in paperback october 15 **

BOOKS

Extended Stay Field Notes: An Unfinished Journey is an intimate companion to Extended Stay, scheduled for release in 2027.

 Travel alongside award-winning documentary photographer and writer, Karen Lippowiths, as she chronicles America’s shadow housing system of low-budget motels across more than nine thousand miles, thirteen states, thirty cities, and nine months. Through documentary photographs, intimate roadside stories, evocative prose, dark humor, and unguarded reflection, Lippowiths confronts the risks, moral questions, and fragile human connections that shape both the journey and the work.

Part journal, part anthology, part photographic essay, and part personal reckoning, Extended Stay offers a candid account of gaining access, building trust, confronting danger, making mistakes, and wrestling with the ethical questions that arise whenever a photographer carrying a camera enters someone else’s private life. Along the way, Lippowiths reveals the uncertainty, fear, pain, hope, absurdity, and unexpected tenderness found in the people and places she encounters.

This 300-page account includes 100+ original documentary photographs from the road.  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.

“Lippowiths gives witness to the human cost of America’s housing crisis through evocative prose and haunting images.”
-  Steven Rimmer
Executive Director, Detroit Tenants Union

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

“Lippowiths uses words and photography to tell a complete story about the housing crisis in America."
- Tristan Taylor
Writer, Left Voice