This is a photograph from the Holographic Studios bathroom in New York. I was there in August at one of the last days before they moved locations. The pictured shelves are an accumulation of decades of cleaning supplies, toiletries, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, kitchenware, and unknown treasures buried in the back.
My girlfriend may be horrified to learn that I love this type of hoard. It summons in me a wonder and nostalgia. When I moved to New York in 2001 and started meeting people locally, shelves like this seemed commonplace. New York dwellings are notoriously small. So where does your stuff go? The answer was often: on the walls.
In places with more space, this stuff of life would be hidden in basements, behind closet doors, deep in crawlspaces, and above attic panels. In New York apartments there is no such place, and so the walls become years and decades-long in-progress sculptures.
Some are well curated. A personal library of books and music, just slightly overstuffed, contents rarely touched, with a few well placed knickknacks. Others, like the holography installations, are constructed like a Jersey shore arcade coin pusher game: teeming with ephemera and somehow not collapsing into chaos.