Every Room a Different Story

I’m kind of loving this project, so I have to give it a little plug. For Amy Lombard’s “Happy Inside (IKEA)” project, she has visited Ikea stores across the country and taken photographs of the rooms which have been staged in the store. Sometimes there are people in the pictures. Sometimes not. But in all of the pictures, the rooms come alive as spaces that are part of a story, and part of a life, rather than just a sales display. Amy is currently trying to raise the funding to get the photographs published as a book.

In this instance, Amy describes the goal of her project so eloquently that I will use her words rather than my own.

Artist’s statement:

As a photographer, I have never been interested in staging reality so to speak— instead, what I am interested in is someone else’s idea of a staged reality. This very thought brought me to the highly constructed rooms that replicate the consumers “ideal home” in IKEA. Everything within the space is meticulously planned, and items are intentionally placed to create a certain effect. This simulation of the home not only sells the product, but most importantly, lends itself to the idea of selling a possible life. These rooms are built for the sole purpose of interaction; what I am interested in photographically are these interactions.

As apart of one of their most recent campaigns, Happy Inside, IKEA conducted an experiment titled Herding Cats where they released 100 cats loose overnight in their Wembley location. Cats live their lives in the pursuit of comfort, so this experiment was to see how exactly the cats reacted once they were released in these constructed environments. What did the cats do? They climbed on sofas, pranced throughout the rooms, slept on beds— treating the space as if it were indeed their own home.

In this day and age, similar to these cats, we too actively live our lives in the pursuit of comfort in any given situation. This “possible life” that I had mentioned — it’s sleek, it’s desirable, it is an aesthetic all on its own — needless to say, we are drawn to it. This shell of a room has the power of giving you a very real sense of privacy in a very public setting. So we act just as these cats do, we treat the space as if it were our own.

The photographs have a way of coercing the viewer into believing they are an accurate portrayal of domesticity. There is a certain degree of empathy involved, nostalgia even. It’s as if I have have seen these photographs before, or perhaps been the person in the photograph. As the viewer, it gives you the notion that these could potentially be my own personal family photographs. Yet despite this familiarity, the subject is unaware; these situations are not set up, planned, or preconceived. They are illusions of reality through the showroom of IKEA.

(You can see more of the images on Amy’s website, or at kickstarter.com where she has set up a page to raise funds for the project.)

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