Susan Schiffman, a photographer, grew up in Westchester, in a house with a fireplace and rooms that smelled of eucalyptus. Around 1985, she moved to the East Village. She married an herbalist, Kim Turim, and moved into his railroad apartment, a rent-stabilized unit near Tompkins Square Park, where they raised their son, Rainer. Eventually, Schiffman began to hear that her neighbors were afraid of being driven out by landlords exploiting real-estate loopholes to raise the rents. She started attending community seminars about landlord-tenant relations and affordable housing. “I just wanted to know who makes the laws,” she said.
Schiffman likes being out on the street, learning the names of the neighborhood children and dogs. Petite, with long, dark, curly hair, she tends to wear all black, accented by red lipstick. Several years ago, she started going up to people and asking, “Are you a rent-stabilized tenant?”
A couple, Drew and Mia, said yes. Could Schiffman photograph their apartment? Yes again. Inside, Schiffman shot a series of still-lifes: a small shrine, a painted sign (“PSYCHIC”), a kitchen corner that contained overripe bananas and a microwave festooned with stickers. The tableaux had a haunting quality that reminded her of “The Poetics of Space,” from 1958, by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The book, whose chapters include “Nests” and “Drawers, Chests, and Wardrobes,” laments modern city dwellers’ profound absence of “roots”—they live not in houses but in superimposed boxes.
Instagram had become a preening zone for overly stylized images of a presumed ideal. Schiffman, posting her photos under the handle @iamarentstabilizedtenant, provided a counterpoint, redefining aspirational as living in a home that a regular person can afford. She shot the apartments of Lisa, Daryl, Sacha, Tanya, Johnny, Andy, and June—all East Villagers, some since the seventies. In apartment after apartment, she captured the small ways in which tenants arranged their material lives—the positioning of houseplants, the clever storage of clothing. Tenants didn’t seem to mind Schiffman seeing dust mops or sex toys left out in the open, but they did mind talking about the terms of their rent. As they confided fears of being “blacklisted” for discussing money, Schiffman learned about the tenant-screening companies that purchase housing-court data and sell it to landlords, who then use it to reject tenants who might make trouble.
Schiffman keeps her subjects’ addresses secret and the captions spare (“drew & mia, east village, since 1997”), and asks a few stock questions. “How did you find your apartment?” prompted responses like “Brenda Sexual found it in the Village Voice” and “Friends of mine, two drag queens (Brandywine and Brenda A Go-Go), had a store on East Seventh Street called Howdy Do.” When Schiffman asked, “What do you think of the East Village today?” a tenant named Glenn said, “I don’t want to eat candied-waffle ice-cream cones.”
Requests for visual descriptions yielded memories of “that old kind of toilet with the oak box,” rooms that were “all rhomboids,” and “the roaches.” Asked what they liked about their place, tenants mentioned “the cross-ventilation,” “the exposed brick,” and “the fact that the bathroom is now in the apartment.” Schiffman elicits stories from people who are both dreading a prospective rent hike and reconsidering the decision to keep a “Mao room.” A neighborhood blog, EV Grieve, runs the answers once a month, along with Schiffman’s photos.
On a recent Sunday, Schiffman walked over to a building near First Avenue. A woman named Jenny was waiting for her on the fourth floor, in yoga pants and a hoodie imprinted with the words “LOCALS ONLY.” Schiffman took in the incense and the wood carvings from India. Jenny, a chef and an astrologer, divulged that, in the sixties, she became a “militant vegetarian” after an acid trip during which God said, “What are you doing?” as she cooked a cube steak.
“Why did you move to the East Village?” Schiffman asked. Jenny answered with a story that involved 1971, Keith Haring, “a bunch of hippies,” AIDS, macrobiotics, Madonna, Oprah, and “Pluto going into Scorpio.” Jenny said that when she first moved in the apartment was “all brown and lime green. Two dancers from ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ lived here.”
Schiffman plucked a Nikon from her backpack and started shooting—moody light at the bedroom windows, a bouquet of bodega roses. Jenny checked an astrology app and said, “Oh! Melania Trump’s gonna have Uranus on her sun.”
Soon, Schiffman had to leave for another appointment. An artist named Lola was waiting for her a few blocks north, in a fourth-floor walkup, in a building redolent with weed. ♦
