Diego Waisman has captured and documented dozens of communities over several years across South Florida.
His work focuses on mobile home communities, which have been subject to development and displacement over the years. The project began in earnest in 2016, when Waisman discovered that a mobile home community—near his own home in Aventura— was being evicted.
“I went there trying to find answers, but then after I captured some of the footage from that community, I realized that this was a trend,” Waisman said. “I felt that it was kind of historic. That all those stories, all those places were going away, and that for some reason, the whole situation had been normalized to the point that nobody really cared.”
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Most recently, mobile home residents in Sweetwater faced mass eviction. Occupants of over 900 trailers in the Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park were given eviction notices last November and told that the property would close permanently in May of this year to be re-developed into an affordable housing project.
“This is not just happening to them,” Waisman said. “This is also happening to those two-story buildings, condos, where there has been affordable housing for hundreds of thousands of people in South Florida, and, little by little, they are being bought and destroyed.”
Just blocks away from Li’l Abner, at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Art Museum, an exhibition of Waisman’s photo series “Sunset Colonies” is open to the public through mid-April, and an opening celebration is set to be held at the museum on Saturday, Feb. 15, at 6 p.m.
The goal of the photo project is to call attention to and destigmatize life inside communities like Lil’ Abner, according to Waisman.
“Sometimes the stigma is so prevalent that people don't face [the] 'inside.' They put all their biases at the entrance of those communities without realizing that it could be somebody's aunt, somebody's mother, somebody who relocated to South Florida, as many other snowbirds, for a better retirement," Waisman said.
Several of Waisman’s “Sunset Colonies” photographs were accepted into the art museum’s permanent collection.
“Now, those photos will live there for other generations to see beyond the book,” he said. “They can be in conversation with other artwork that the Frost also shows.”
A photo book by the same name was also published in September. The project is called a “visual elegy” for the people and places impacted by rapid development across the South Florida region.
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