Judy Gelles received her MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1991. Her work is in major collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Most recently she was awarded a Fellowship in the Arts from the Independence Foundation in Philadelphia, a project grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and an Artist Residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Presently she teaches Photography at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and the International Center of Photography in New York City.

Beach Boxes, Melbourne, Victoria Australia (2002). For $185,000 the purchaser buys the rights to pay the council several hundred dollars in annual rent. This is for a simple shed with no electricity, water, or any features at all other than proximity to sand and water. Only locals are allowed to acquire them and they are immensely prized possessions. Some stay in families for more than fifty years.

Trailer Park : Mobile Home Portraits. In 1982, on a friend's recommendation, my father bought a mobile home overlooking a golf course in Melbourne Beach, Florida. My family and I have visited every January since then. I photograph at night, after 8:00pm. The streets are desolate. The mobile home park is transformed; lit by moonlight, all is quiet and still.

---