"If I had known how much work was involved, perhaps I never would have started.” Belgian photographer Barbara Iweins is thinking about the decision she made six years ago to photograph every object she owned. The project took four years and 12,795 photos later, her task was complete. Now her work is on show at the Cortona on the Move photography festival in Tuscany.

  • Bruja [she/her, love/loves]
    ·
    1 year ago

    "I never used or moved 56% of the objects."

    That's probably a better estimate of things not needed. She mostly says 1% of the items are irreplaceable. Not that The gallery and artist commentary is actually sort of interesting. The article comes off as "Women do be shopping and buying things they don't need" though and it's irritating.

    She saw her project as a counter to social media users “posting pictures of their ideal life – what they’re buying, what they’re eating”.

    “I wanted to play with it and I thought: ‘I’m not going to show this ideal recto of an ideal life, I’m going to show the verso, the holes in underwear and stuff like that.’”

    How everything is catalogued and categorised and sorted has some fun data. It would be cool to have people in other cultures do this and compare/contrast.

    • NeelixBiederman [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I remember a photo book that did a similar concept of cultures around the world showing what one week's worth of food for their family looked like

      Found it lets-fucking-go

      • Bruja [she/her, love/loves]
        ·
        1 year ago

        That's great, thank you!
        Feel bad for the one family with 12x2L bottles of soda a week, but the honesty and getting a peek into other cultures is fascinating.

        • RedDawn [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah coke is huge in México and a lot of Latin America unfortunately. I also drink more than I should, I need to be drinking more water and less of that garbage

        • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
          ·
          1 year ago

          By some measures, Mexico has the highest per capita consumption of soda in the world. Some of this has to do with Coca-Cola owning the water supply.

          https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/water-scarce-mexican-town-coca-cola

      • Dryad [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Lmao at the Japanese family barely able to cram a week's worth of food into one room

    • glans [it/its]
      ·
      1 year ago

      It would best include communal/shared items a person has easy access to, not only those they personally have "ownership" of. And it should include people who they could ask or hire to help them to do things.

      If you did that you'd find everyone on earth with lots of stuff.