This Artist Spent Two Years Photographing Everything She Owns

Belgian photographer Barbara Iweins has always produced works that deal with her obsession of aesthetic, beauty, human oddness and, in our opinion, that thin line between personal intimacy and vulnerability. Her latest project, Katalog, is perhaps the best example of this voyeuristic style and puts her front and center through a ten-thousand plus item exploration of everything she owns. As she described it, the project that was started in 2018 is “a radical confrontation with my possessions through my photographic lens. The exposure of oneself, pushed to its paroxysm.” In practice, those two-plus years of work with 15 hours a week led her to shoot photographs of all 10,000+ objects in her house “in order to rigorously confront myself with everything I own, I then classified everything by material, colour, their frequency of use and their emotional value.” The end result is a body of work that’s as equally impressive as it is influential in forcing you to confront the objects you interact with on a regular basis.