Alyssa Miserendino knows a side of the foreclosure crisis few of us ever see.

The inside.

In April the Chicago photographer began her series “insideout Chicago 2009.”  Photographing the interiors of foreclosed and short sale homes throughout the city of Chicago, hoping to capture the essence of displacement and abandonment.

Nothing is staged; she shoots what she sees.  Sometimes the items left behind—like a child’s homework strewn across the floor—are remnants of lives set permanently to pause.

Miserendino once found a brown craft paper sign marked “Rest in Peace” with signatures scrawled across it.  In another home she discovered all the furnishings were tagged for a garage sale.  “It’s like having a life that’s been exhausted with nowhere to go, it’s trapped inside this vacuum,” Miserendino says.

Some homes sit so perfectly preserved it looks like someone’s elderly grandmother just stepped out for bingo.

Yet when Miserendino walked into the kitchen of the home pictured above, she saw the entire ceiling had collapsed.

“You can tell squatters have been there in some cases.  There’s one image where it looks like someone got out of bed and walked out,” she said.

The photographer says  “opening up a dialogue to change,” is the purpose of the work.  “What is important is that property should not remain idle. When it does, it is wasted to the community,” she says.

“I alone cannot figure it out myself,  but its going to take people in the community of the homeless, people in the construction world, people in the banking sector to try to figure out how to meet everybody’s needs without stepping on everybody’s toes,” she says.

Works from her “insideout Chicago 2009″ series will be on display December 3-6 at Merchandise Mart’s One of a Kind Show and Sale Chicago. She is also creating a book of the images which she hopes will help fund her next series “our world insideout.”