Show me your home, I’ll tell you who you are.

Sue Casa is an ongoing photographic series that I began in 2025 as part of my larger pictorial autobiography, The Silent Life of Susan Who? The work was made in my apartment on Oleanderstraat in Amsterdam, where I have lived for the past five years.

The title plays with the idea that a home reveals something essential about the person who inhabits it. The Dutch saying, "Toon me je huis en ik zal je zeggen wie je bent" ("Show me your home, and I will tell you who you are"), suggests that our homes are reflections of our inner lives. Yet Sue Casa emerged from a contradiction. Although I have lived happily in many homes in Amsterdam, this apartment became the most difficult place I have ever inhabited.

Living in a challenging and often oppressive environment, I found myself increasingly withdrawn into a small, dark interior. The curtains remained closed for much of the time, turning the apartment into a space of isolation and protection. Within that darkness, however, light became an event. A narrow beam crossing a wall, a reflection moving across a table, a brief illumination of an ordinary object — these fleeting moments became the focus of my attention.

Photographing them developed into a daily ritual and, gradually, a necessity. What began as an attempt to observe these passing transformations evolved into a body of more than 300 photographs. The camera allowed me to reclaim the space around me, transforming a place associated with difficulty into a site of looking, reflection, and creation.

In this sense, Sue Casa is not simply a record of an apartment. It is a testimony to resilience. The photographs trace an effort to find beauty, meaning, and presence within a space that often felt uninhabitable. If photography had not offered me a way of seeing, I am not sure how I would have endured living there.

Acquired by the Amsterdam City Archives as part of its collection relating to the homes and working environments of artists represented in its holdings, Sue Casa documents the domestic space of visual artist Susan Zadeh. At the same time, it records how an artistic practice can emerge from necessity, and how acts of looking can transform even the most difficult spaces into places of imagination and survival.

Photographs from this new series together with an artist handmade book, were exhibited in 2025, in a group show “The Photograph as Object” at the Nazraeli Showroom Daido Star Space, The Reef, 1933 S. Broadway, downtown Los Angeles.