‘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.
The decision came after a divorce and having to move house for the 11th time. “I was exhausted to have all these objects to pack once again. I really wanted to see what it was like – a houseful of objects. I decided to photograph room by room and drawer by drawer. I was putting Post-its on the drawers because I was scared of photographing the same thing again.”
Objects from Iweins’ bathroom
The result is an extraordinary inventory of the commonplace, the personal, the irreplaceable and the intimate. No object was too mundane for inclusion – safety pins, clingfilm, screws, hooks, toilet rolls, hangers, keys, socks, pants and plates all made the cut.
Goldorak: ‘For a long time my mother wondered why I had bruises on my legs. It was simply because I was sleeping with this hard plastic toy’
The brand names are similarly quotidian – Vanish, Pledge, Cif, Bic, Sudocrem, Dove, Playmobil and Lego. Among so much domestic flotsam are precious items with personal significance, such as a Goldorak toy she was obsessed with as a child, and objects usually kept out of sight in her bedside table – lubricant, condoms and antidepressants.
The cumulative effect of viewing Iweins’ anodyne product shots can be overwhelming, and suggestive of an unchecked consumerism. She concedes that she and her three children are “extremely messy”, and that she has been a collector with an interest in vintage clothing in particular, but she describes her buying habits as otherwise normal. She is probably not the only parent of three children who aspires to a more minimalist lifestyle.
Besides her desire to get a measure of just how much stuff she possessed, Iweins was pursuing an interest in consumption and instant gratification. 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.’”
‘I hate cooking, and the kitchen was super-difficult to photograph – it was really like the most boring thing’
Her commitment to the fullest disclosure introduced difficulties. She had to resist the urge to discard, unphotographed, a vibrator. And it was only with reluctance that she included what she feels is her most unlovable object: “a mould of my teeth. I don’t especially like my teeth, it’s extremely personal, and it’s a horrible mould. But I had to be honest.”
Clothes, too, presented problems, especially those she had bought and then forgotten. “We are hiding stuff that we are buying,” she laments. “Everything is in closets – that’s the thing.” Perhaps transparent wardrobes might be a solution. “I was rediscovering skirts and thinking: ‘I haven’t worn this – it’s really quite nice. Now I’m going to use it and use it.’”
‘We are hiding stuff that we are buying’ … Barbara Iweins with some of her object images at Cortona on the Move. Photograph: Guy Lane
As her photographic evidence accumulated, Iweins organised and classified her pictures, including by colour, material and frequency of use. She can field her own array of idiosyncratic – and not always impressive – statistics: 21% of bathroom objects are metallic, 43% are plastic; 1% of her clothes are purple, a colour she hates.
“I noted that 37% of our Playmobil figures are bald. I never used or moved 56% of the objects. I think I’m the only person who knows – well it’s not very important – that the dominant colour in my house is blue.”
Iweins and her brother once spent months fighting over this ‘super-ugly’ cup
Most significantly, she says, she came to realise that “only 1% of these objects are important: 99% I could get rid of. Most of the objects I really care for are the things I cannot replace.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, once finished, Iweins was able to throw away full bin bags. Similarly, her shopping habits cooled. “The thing that changed most are the clothes. I think recently is the first time I’ve bought clothes in four years.”
Her most treasured belonging is a dahlia, at once delicate and invulnerable, preserved in a jar of formalin. She had seen it in a shop in Amsterdam and her cousin later bought it for her. She is drawn to its permanence. “I’ve had a divorce and I’ve lost a boyfriend to cancer. These objects – the 1% that are important to me and my children – I know they are going to be there. I realised – it’s pathetic, I know – that you can rely on things.”
Accumulating objects, she says, “was my therapy. There’s so much chaos in the world, and in my head, that the inertia of things – they are my reference. I know what I am saying is sad, but it’s true.”
Dahlia preserved in formalin
As an unanticipated benefit of her work, now published as a book called Katalog, Iweins is enjoying a new security. “It structured my thoughts, organising all the chaos. Before, I was scared that something terrible would happen in my life. Now that there is the book, everything can catch fire and at least I will have this reminder that it existed, that it was there. This project was a consolation in a way.”
At the beginning of the process, she says, “I thought it was about overconsumption. And actually, I realised it was more a project about myself.”
• Cortona on the Move international photography festival, Tuscany, runs until 1 October. Katalog is published by Delpire
