Little boxes

Little Boxes is a photo novel created, photographed, and designed by Daria Addabbo, who has long explored the photo novel as a contemporary form rooted in the Italian fotoromanzo and intertwined with the visual language of the graphic novel.

Set in Palm Springs, the project features Francesca Forquet, an Italian photographer based in Los Angeles, who plays the role of a photographer commissioned by a major American magazine to produce a tribute marking the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth (1926).

In the story, the protagonist moves through Palm Springs on foot, an unusual choice in the urban context of the U.S., before later driving into the surrounding desert. The landscape becomes a metaphor for inner disorientation, a place where the promise of freedom meets the limits of solitude.

The narrative unfolds through Malvina Reynolds’ song Little Boxes (1962), which evokes the postwar spread of suburbia and a society in which these “little boxes,” identical houses, contain lives that follow the same patterns, echoing the repetitive structure of the song itself. This repetition mirrors the song’s form, whose verses return like a lullaby. Following this thread, Forquet photographs the pastel-colored houses of Palm Springs as metaphors for this social landscape, questioning the myth of the American Dream.

The project concludes with the real photographs taken by Forquet, shifting the gaze from fiction to reality.