Although we have a long list of bookmarked interiors blogs, we don’t find many ideas there anymore. The ultra-controlled, styled photography lends a sameness to the interiors that we find dispiriting. We want to see REAL, into the personal spaces of people living for themselves, as their lives dictate the design, rather than the idea that they will be photographed.
And REAL is what we’ve happily found looking at the work of photographer Dominique Nabokov. Nabokov was way ahead of the curve twenty years ago when she photographed the spaces of notable New Yorkers using a Polaroid 600 SE camera, with the last of its Colorgraph type 691 film, which rendered color transparencies in 4 minutes. She eschewed lighting and tripod and embraced the film’s “accidental, eccentric colors”. The now out-of-print New York Living Rooms is a trove: interior photographs that yield a clear sense of her subjects’ very unique styles, and many original ideas.
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No rearranging, no adding of bouquets, no use of flood lights. I approach the living rooms like I approach the people I photograph: a portrait as close to reality as possible.
Joy.
With thanks to the great, late, Mondo-Blogo that no longer publishes but remains online for all to see. Go there to see a long riff of Nabokov’s Paris LIving Rooms.
Refreshing! Not only do hyper-stylized spaces lend a “sameness” as you say, but for me, there is also an un-lived in sadness.
Beautiful! Thank you for the introduction to Nabokov and the real world of lived-in rooms.
Inspirational!