Shifts is a two-year ongoing project that grew out of photographing vacated houses for real estate agencies in the suburbs and countryside of England. Alexandra Giarraputo-Pym’s photographs are in a sense self-portraits, moments experienced in a space of absence and anonymity, with only the echoes of domesticity, when she feels her presence in the world most clearly. They are portraits of life — her life — as a process of physically locating oneself, addressing cultural and social estrangement, and enduring. Alexandra Giarraputo-Pym studied photography in the late 1990s and early 2000s at the School of Visual Arts, New York, the San Francisco Art Institute and Parsons School of Design. She studied with Henry Wessel in San Francisco. In her early 30s she worked in the production department of Box Studios in Manhattan, collaborating on books and exhibitions for, among others, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, the estate of Guy Bourdin, and Roni Horn. She left New York with her husband and newborn son to live in Copenhagen, where she taught a course on photo books at the KBH Film and Photography School, and where her daughter was born. She has lived in rural England since 2012, where she is currently teaching Photography at a Steiner Waldorf high school and working on her first book, Shifts.