Stephen Reiss: Home

There's been some heated discussion in Germany recently after a columnist of the newspaper Die Welt called same-sex couples "deficient" and deemed them unable to raise children. One of the most powerful and poignant answers to this outrageous ignorance can be found in the work of photojournalist Stephen Reiss and his Home project.
Home is a beautiful, tender long-time observation made in the Bronx, NYC home of Eshey Scarborough and Paris Harris, a lesbian couple who have raised twenty foster kids in ten years - and there will be more. Reiss started the project as a student and soon found himself entangled in the extended family, carefully documenting the life in the family and the individual lives after foster care.
"We believe the service we give is the rent we pay to stay on the planet", states Eshey Scarborough in the New York Times. Many of her foster girls identify as LGBT, live with disabilities or are scarred by abuse, and would probably have never had a perspective in life, if it hadn't been for Scarborough and Harris. The pictures show the family eating together, praying, playing, celebrating birthdays. They also show the sad and lonely times: a girl crying, fears of death and isolation captured in a diary.
But when one strips away the knowledge of the unusual materialisation of this family, the Home project becomes a very 'normal' portrait of a family - including all the ups and downs, children growing up and moving on, children returning to the nurturing arms of their parents, cuddly toys, pets, huge cooking pans. There is nothing deficient about this family, on the contrary: Reiss has captured a family as wholesome as one can wish for - with a few more children than one would expect, perhaps.