Monica Strømdahl earned a BA in Photography at a Fine Arts programme at a university in southern England.
She has worked as a freelance photographer in Oslo for eight years. In 2005, by coincidence, she discovered a unique hotel in Brooklyn, just one subway stop from Manhattan. It had many permanent residents, some of whom had lived there for several years. In teeny little enclosures with partitions between them, chicken wire as a ceiling and just enough room for a bed. Doors with padlocks. No windows. Stale air. Her first impression of the Glenwood Hotel was that it was a scary, dirty and dangerous place. There was a baseball game blaring on the blurry TV screen in the lobby. The bed was lumpy, the bed linen stained. After a few hours, there were drugs, prostitution. Some nights were filled with arguments, threats and violence. The environment seemed chaotic and dangerous. The people aggressive and surly. However, as time passed, the residents got used to Monica, and she got used to them.
Gentrification killed Glenwood. The banks came first, then the galleries and the hipsters.
In 2010, the hotel was sold and the residents were reluctantly evicted and spread to the winds. Instead, the developers opened a trendy hotel for European tourists. The Glenwood was the last of its kind in New York. There are, however, other flop houses all across the US. However, their stories are fading away rapidly. Monica Strømdahl wants to patronise these hotels. To document the lives lived there, before they disappear. The hotels form her framework, but it is the people and their everyday lives that form her content.
