Book Project: Work Force Housing

At the height of this spring’s COVID season, I got very restless and started to work on a little book project involving the photographs and video that we had captured in the Bakken oil patch over the five years (or so) of the North Dakota Man Camp Project.

I then submitted it to a “dream press” and I found out this past week that they would not publish it. This is hardly unexpected and not even disappointing.

But now, I need to figure out what to do with this manuscript, if anything.

You can check out the book here, if you want.

Any thoughts on a publisher who might consider a book like this would be very much appreciated (or if you are publisher and think this sounds cool, do drop me a line!).

Here’s the little introduction:

This volume is an experiment.

The initial goal was to collect images and interviews related to our study of Man Camp 11 as part of the North Dakota Man Camp Project. Our team returned to this camp over 10 times from 2012 to 2018 and documented its changed through interviews, notes, drawings, and photographs. This work traced the life of the camp from a newly organized RV park to a bustling neighborhood of improvised housing and finally, to a sparsely occupied ghost town of abandoned RVs and empty lots. Over this time, the camp also saw multiple owners, multiple managers, maintenance challenges, new policies, lawsuits, and changes in reputation.

The images and interviews in this volume also communicate our own movement through the space of the camp. This is particularly true of Richard Rothaus’s video which we sampled into a series of stills and arranged vertically or horizontally one the page. The other photographs in the volume also capture the varied approaches to documenting the RVs and buildings and preserve both the movement of the individual photographer and the relationship between objects in the camp.

This is obviously a work in progress. We have yet to determine its final state. We can, however, state what we don’t want this volume to become. It is not going to present a single, final statement on this camp. The images and interviews here will not serve as illustrations or evidence for an argument that we formally articulate. It is not meant to be a single statement or summary or final word on our research.

Maybe it can serve as a start to something else.

William Caraher Grand Forks, ND May 4, 2020