History may not exactly repeat itself, but it certainly moves in familiar cycles - as one alumna discovers as she explores and photographs ghost towns of the past and present.
As we drove through the imposing gates, into a world of ostentation and excess, we couldn't help but notice the unfinished golf courses. My guide, a family friend, motioned out the driver's side window, "Down this road is Celine Dion's house."
We looked to our left at an impressive housing compound behind uninviting front gates. Our family friend and his wife had recently moved to Nevada and had been looking to buy a home. They had been looking right in the middle of the developing credit crisis, later known as the subprime mortgage crisis, and also looking in one of the hardest hit areas in the United States.
We stopped in front of two houses, with only their unkempt and withering side yards separating the two. We walked into the first house and were greeted by overturned tables, cables hanging from the walls, holes in the ceiling and a dust-covered kitchen counter strewn with real estate agents' business cards.
"Can you believe they show these places 'as is'? They don't even have time to clean the houses now ... there are just so many," our friend observed as he walked out into the backyard to have a look at the pool that had turned green. 
We were standing inside a home in one of the more lavish neighborhoods, only a short drive from the glittering Las Vegas strip. The house had been left to ruin by the owner, who was forced into foreclosure and had simply walked away from the property without waiting for the bank. Both houses had the same eerie feeling of sudden abandonment: living room chairs, laundry, a collection of toilet brushes, even an entire stereo system left behind, not enough room in the moving van and clearly not enough time.
These were the first "subprime" homes I was able to visit, soon after the crisis hit in February 2008.
I was visiting my parents in New Mexico, and we were on a road trip for a photo project I was beginning on "Ghost Towns of the American Southwest."
As an American photographer living and working in Paris, France, I have become increasingly aware of things that make us uniquely American: characteristics, both negative and positive, that truly do set us apart from other nations.
After my parents relocated to New Mexico, I became more aware of one of these historical dimensions symbolized by the existence of ghost towns in that part of the country. The French have always had a fascination with cowboys, Indians and Route 66, which I have always found endearing. But what was it about ghost towns and specifically Western ghost towns that made them so fascinating and mysterious?
Soon after I began to coordinate my trip to the States to start the ghost town project, I started to read more and more about the growing subprime mortgage crisis and was struck by their similarities. The subprime crisis was hitting parts of the Southwest particularly hard, displaying a false sense of success and material wealth and exhibiting some people's penchant to take a huge gamble, which only an American would typically be willing to take.
Case in point, the gold rush of 1849 and the subsequent other precious metal rushes that lasted well into the 1920s in the American West led to great wealth for a few lucky entrepreneurs and the creation of industrial empires, but it also brought on ruin for many fortune hunters and the abandonment of entire towns. A century later, at the end of 2008, new ghost towns began to appear: entire suburbs of condominiums and houses left open and empty, a product of the subprime mortgage crisis and a visible result of the economic recession that had hit the economy.
Our collective imagination and perhaps the passing years may have allowed us to think that the unlucky fortune hunters leaving their towns were not leaving in despair and desolation, but rather in the hopeful expectation of finding new fortunes elsewhere. History, however, tells us that they did not abandon their towns for the promise of another El Dorado - because, simply, there was no more gold or silver. Those precious metals had either run out or been mined by more successful, avid entrepreneurs.
Today's dispossessed inhabitants did not leave their homes in the search for gold. However, the reality facing people in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis was just as harsh. Their ruin was just as visible and the personal and collective consequences just as dire as for their unsuccessful ancestors. 
This phenomenon of seeking new opportunity and fortune that seems so distinctively American, raises an interesting question: How is it possible to create an economic situation in which one is forced to abandon everything?
Unlike the French system, welfare and Social Security are not as accessible here. The recession has caused mass job loss. Furthermore, the notion of variable mortgage rates and the ease with which these were handed out to previously ineligible candidates lacking the required credit history and income rendered the entire home equity ownership system vulnerable to the oncoming financial crisis as well as being one of its prime contributors.
Upon visiting both ghost towns of the 19th century and the subprime homes of the 21st century, I developed the idea to create a project demonstrating a photographic as well as contextual parallel between the two events. I employed dyptychs to show the parallels: an image taken of a 19th-century ghost town paired with an image of a new ghost town of the 21st century. Using structure, subject and graphic composition, the images become a mirror of one another. I developed this project to demonstrate the ironic parallels between these two events and to reflect on the American Dream: be it in the precarious hunt for gold and silver or the determination to own a home.
Many Americans are driven by their dreams of social status and individual success, as well as by an extraordinary naivete and the illusion that all will turn out well. The modern history of our country - with the quest for the imagined fortunes in the American Southwest and the triumph of capitalism - have shown many that free market law is often the law of the jungle: Only the most ingenious, the most foreseeing and the most aware of market evolution in both social and political contexts will survive.
Despite the great "all can succeed" discourse of the American Dream, the self-interest of the strong and the absence of an established system of protection for the weak is what often prevails. The reckless hunt for material wealth, the "I deserve more" of the "me-generation" indoctrinated by the modern American way of life, reflects a lack of critical reflection that has in part triggered the current crisis.
The American Dream is not dead, but it's been compromised. 