Photography Project from 2019
Some projects find you. This one started with a question I couldn’t stop thinking about: if your house were on fire and you could only save one object, what would you take?
When I had this idea and started thinking about it, I was scared that everyone would choose the iPhone or the external disks. So when I was explaining this to the participants, I had to say they would have to imagine they were in the shower, or that they could come back in time and pick up one thing after the house was all burned down.
“House on Fire” was my first solo exhibition, produced and shown in Stavanger. The concept was simple, but the answers were anything but. I invited people from different backgrounds, nationalities, ages, and walks of life into their own homes — photographing them in the room where they spent most of their time, holding the one object they would choose to save.
What emerged was something I hadn’t fully anticipated. Some people reached for practical tools — a passport, a phone, a folder of diplomas. Others grabbed objects soaked in memory and love — a grandmother’s necklace, a childhood teddy bear, a jar of plum jam left behind by a friend who had passed. A 4-year-old from Kazakhstan chose a bottle of water because he could drink it, share it, and use it to put out the fire.
Going to their home-made logistics was much harder, and maybe some said no because of this part of the project. But the idea behind it was to choose people who decided to also “leave behind“. The exhibition was at the same venue where I had rented a desk, so I had no way to count how many people actually came. But I remember that we talked about around 230 visitors. My favourite part was having people say things like “now I have to go home and think about what I would save“.
The photography was intentionally minimal. Natural daylight. No staging. No artistic processing. Just the person, the object, and the story behind it. I always wanted to have a window close by, as an “emergency exit” light.
This year, this project will be seven years old, and I like that I still love the idea; maybe one day I will go back and do it with more people. Still today, we are so overwhelmed and attached to our phones that we no longer value the small things in life. An old book that grandpa gave, that is much more than a book, it’s a memory full of stories. Or a jam that will never be eaten, and will forever be kept in the fridge, because it represents friendship.
Because some time has passed, I decided to put the book online, let others decide whether they think it is a nice project, and hopefully… Rethink about what they would choose if this were themselves.