What makes a house a home?
We buy a house. We come home at night (or we used to).
We talk of housing prices. We crave home cooking.
Buildings have house numbers. Home is where the heart is.
Every lucky house has things that make it a home. We, as the occupants, collect treasures and detritus over the years, and we store that in our houses, protected from theft and the ravages of nature. Yet every house has a unique collection of these things, and viewed together they sometimes tell a story. And if the house and its owners are fortunate, it is a happy story.
Recently I was asked to photograph a home owned by some old acquaintances. The husband died and then the wife moved closer to the kids. One of the children wanted the house, but sometimes things just don't work the way we might desire. So this child's spouse wanted to craft a book of pictorial reminders and that was my task.
In doing this shoot I used a digital camera to speed workflow. But as I roamed through the empty structure I couldn't help but see items that really made me feel at home in a house I had never previously entered. And I believe that anything worth photographing is worth doing on film.
And so it was that I decided to capture this home's personality, as defined by the previous occupants. I further decided that I would give myself ten images in which to do this, that being the number of frames on a roll of 120 film when shooting with a Mamiya RZ67 camera.
