Second Nature by Sarah Malakoff

We curate our most intimate spaces to create an environment that elicits responses ranging from relaxation, sophistication, to adventurousness. Our tastes, personalities, quirks and culture are expressed through our décor choices – sometimes intentionally, but often without realizing bits of our most authentic selves have seeped to the surface.

The photographs in Second Nature are a collection of private spaces that ask the viewer to imagine the people who inhabit them. We see both the unique ways we live behind closed doors, as well as the universal impulse to control our environment. In my images, the home is seen as both a refuge from and at times a re-creation of the outside world. For example, doors and windows can both frame exterior views and serve to keep the elements at bay. Landscape, weather, and wildlife lurk outside the walls even as they are brought safely inside in the form of pattern, simulation, and domesticated animals. Tensions and humor appear between absence and presence, genuine and artificial, the domestic and the natural worlds.

Sarah Malakoff lives and works in Boston, MA.
To view more of Sarah's work, please visit her website.

You can purchase the photograph "Untitled Interior (B in white room)" from Fraction Editions.