Home Ground #1
Bozeman, Montana
2024
I’ve always admired the photographs and writings of Wright Morris, who took quiet photos of the objects and environs in people’s day to day lives back in the 1940s and 50s that, while only rarely showing actual people in them, revealed compelling vignettes of those people’s lives. He also wrote extensively about life in those times (fiction and nonfiction), but to me it is the photos themselves that have the greatest impact.
The Fashion Queen and I spent 20 years designing and building our own home in the mountains and twice that long filling it with things that have made it a home to us. It occurred to me recently that our house and contents are old enough now to certainly be considered interesting in the sense that it has that patina of age and use that may lend itself to interesting visual storytelling. That is perhaps especially true given we built the house to begin with features reminiscent of homes from the Victorian Age.
It’s not in my wheelhouse to write the kind of prose that Morris did to go along with his photos, but I can make a good stab at the photography end of such storytelling. So recently I started working on a series of images of our house, documenting various architectural details and the still life tableaus to be found just about anywhere you look in the place. It’s a work in progress and will be presented in no particular order. I’m expecting many “do-overs” in regard to some of the images that may not be quite right the first time around.
In the years leading up to designing and building our house, I tried my hand at furniture. The bookcase in this photo was one of those projects.
Very nice.
Thanks Mike!