“Somewhere We Know” explores through photography the depths of people’s most personal areas: their bedrooms. Armed with sheets of foam core and rolls of gaffer’s tape, I found eight people willing to let me take over their rooms, and proceeded to turn their rooms into camera obscuras.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of a camera obscura, it is the same property of light which drives a modern camera: if you take a space, be it a room or a box, and make it entirely light-tight, you can then make a small hole in one wall and the scene from outside will actually project onto the opposing wall. With cameras, the image is then manipulated with lenses to invert it and allow for focusing; however, with a primitive camera obscura, what you see is what you get.
My goal was to see two distinct spaces playing against each other. One, the bedroom, is a statement of who a person is and how they live. It is a closed, deeply personal area which each person holds most dear. The other is the world outside their window, a wide open space full of its own character, without the restrictions we place on our personal spaces. The interaction of these spaces is an interesting contrast. Some rooms seemed to invite the scene in, allowing it to splay across the wall, while some almost seemed to actively refuse the scene, to the point where it is barely visible. This lined up almost perfectly with the personalities of the rooms’ owners; some were welcoming, some were standoffish, and others bordered on hostile.
Most of the models, as outsiders to the photographic world, were stunned at the principle in action. One even called it witchcraft. But every one of them considered it to be a portrait, not just of their rooms, but of their lives.
