Hi Friends! Quick note—I’m taking a little pause over the holiday weekend and won’t post next week. See you soon and thank you all so much for reading and supporting and sharing this work. I am grateful! X-She
I first started noticing porches during the pandemic when I took to wandering around local neighborhoods with my camera. I realize how cat burglary that sounds. But I have the same amount of upper body strength as a plate of linguini so hoisting myself over fences or windowsills is a near impossibility. While some people baked their anxiety into sourdough I took mine for long walks to any place I could safely get to.
There’s a ton of varied architectural styles in this area, but Victorians are particularly prevalent. They are built for black-diamond level gawking and curb appeal. Try to pass by one of these with their gorgeous gingerbread woodwork, bright, multi-colored detailing, and most certainly haunted-ass towers. You cannot. In fact, if you stand on the sidewalk and look long enough at the beautiful front parlor with the stained glass transom windows, you can almost see the ghost of Walt Whitman reading some naughty poem while the ladies of the house blush behind their fans. All of this and massive front porches, too
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Victorian houses evolved along with the porch “craze” of the nineteenth century. That’s right: architecture goes to wacky town! Let’s build a 5,000 square foot house for the Deringer family of 12, along with a live-in cook and two maids. But, you know what? Screw it! Throw on another 15 feet in the front! Let those Stocktons next door drool in their tureens! I can only imagine there were a lot of sick burns like this exchanged between folks in the 1800s as suburban areas became more populated and people built these giant, ornate single family homes. On the one hand, the front porch was a logical extension of the house’s aesthetic. On the other, it performed a new, critical function for nineteenth-century families: the porch was a place to see and be seen (Subtext: How do you like us now, Stocktons with your small, sad family of seven and only one maid who isn’t even Irish?).
Porches are an extension of the personality of the house. I noticed lovely antique furniture and other quaint items displayed on many of the Victorians that drew me in for a closer gawk. Others rocked amazing greenery, letting their gardens crawl over railings, climb up posts, and spill along awnings in a sort of playful battle for territory. Team Nature—hands down. Charming, idyllic, inviting, a little island to escape to without going very far—was porch envy a thing I wondered.
I thought about a Twitter thread I stumbled upon during the early weeks of lock down. It was from a Canadian photographer who, like so many artists and creatives, had turned to his art to try and blunt the dreary, fearful days of sheltering in place. He put out a call to take free “porchtraits.” As long as he could safely travel to your house, he’d come over and photograph you and your family or pets or lockdown besties right on your front porch. Of course people wanted to not only break up the monotony of pandemic life, but to also try and reclaim some practices that gave them a semblance of familiarity. This guy’s “porchtraits” checked a few of those boxes.
I’m not going to say I became slightly obsessed with his Twitter feed or that I spent more than a few mornings lost in a kind of therapy scroll gazing at the images of sweet-faced Canadian families clad in matching red flannel shirts posed on their porch along with their golden retriever sprawled belly up across the entire top step (also wearing a red flannel bandana). I’m also not going to say there was a considerable amount of crying. But what I really appreciated about his photographs was how he reminded us what a porch could do and be.
Porches are stages. Another term for porch is “verandah,” synonymous with the French term for porch, “galerie” or “gallery.” They can foster distance. They can create a gulf between you and an encounter with another person; they can be little islands. But in the “porchtrait” images, none of that seemed like the case. Instead the porch went from being a boundary to being a bridge. Togetherness. Connection. Fellowship. It was all still possible despite this period of crushing disconnection and alienation from one another. And all it took was the right kind of place built for seeing and being seen.
