Reels from Home
Reels from Home
An ongoing personal practice, documenting the objects and furniture collected in an apartment in Singapore, shot, cut and posted on iPhone.
An ongoing personal practice, documenting the objects and furniture collected in an apartment in Singapore, shot, cut and posted on iPhone.

Process

Every other page on this site had a client. This one has an apartment in Singapore and whatever's in it. The subject is what's already at home: a 1958 Eames side chair reupholstered in Girard's Checker, a Rimowa storage stool sitting beside two Rimowa cases from the 1970s, a wooden ramen ticket machine that pays out on a hand crank, stacking mugs thrown from Mount Aso's volcanic soil, a book you can almost hear. Things chosen slowly, over years, for reasons that don't fit a caption.

Object content on Instagram usually comes in one of two forms. The product shot, clean and rotating, and the flat lay, everything arranged and nothing touched. Both show the thing. Neither shows why anyone would want it.

So the work is about the detail that made the object worth having, and detail usually means motion. The crank turns and the lights come on. The stool's lid lifts and the leather dividers are waiting underneath. The pour hits the coffee grounds in slow motion on a monsoon afternoon. A phone gets closer than a camera would, and a cut held a beat longer lets the mechanism finish. The captions do the rest: who made it, when, and where it sits now, written the way a collector talks rather than the way a shop does.

Everything is one pair of hands. Shot on iPhone in available light, edited, written and posted the same day. No crew, no brief, no approval chain, which is either the easiest production on this site or the hardest, depending on the week.

The feed found its audience without promotion. The response settles on the same two things, the motion pieces and the eye for the small stuff, which is about the most useful feedback a person in this job can get.