Autopsy of a House

This project was shot in an affluent suburb in Southern Ohio. The house had been abandoned at a time when the rest of the neighborhood was still inhabited. The concept for the photography was to view the entire house impartially, making a dissection of the home. This required applying a scientific method to taking pictures of the interiors.

The technique I used was as follows: I kept the camera on a tripod and always kept it at a height equal to eye level, and always maintained a fixed focal length (17mm) of the zoom lens. I took a measuring tape and found the center of each wall. I then put the camera at that center point, and all the way back against the wall (with an angle finder for focus). I leveled the camera both horizontally and vertically, and I took a shot from the center of each of the four walls of the room in this manner. I repeated this process for every room in the house.

After all of the shots were taken, I spliced the shots, so that each room unfolds into a single image. The images of each room are then taken as a whole to represent the entire house. It is interesting to note that the height of the prints never changes, so one can get an accurate representation of the size of each room when he/she sees the varying widths of the prints.

From the few objects that are left in the house, and the markings that are left on the walls, one can get a sense of how the family lived. Every room has been painted a different, bright color to distinguish it from the next, and the mural painted in the living room is a likeness of the front of the house as it is approached from the bottom of the driveway. One can often see into the next room through open doorways, and can use the differing colors to mentally comprehend the layout of the house.

Technical Info:
Each image was made with a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 1Ds with a Canon Angle Finder C and a 17–40mm f/4 lens at the 17mm focal length. Interior exposures ranged from 1 second to 0.3 seconds at f/9. The outdoor image of the home’s exterior was shot at 1/125 at f/9.0. White balance was a custom setting ranging from 3600K to 5200K and varied from room to room. Brightness and contrast were increased in varying amounts on the interior files in RAW file processing. Tint was adjusted as needed. Images were assembled one at a time in Photoshop, blending the transitions between individual shots until the result looked uniform.

Raymond Adams is an interior photographer who is interested in showing the human presence in the spaces we occupy and the objects we use. He began college at the University of Kentucky as an architecture student and completed nearly three years of study before switching majors, completing college, and moving to New York to pursue a career in photography. However, architecture continues to exert a grasp on his creative efforts, and space and form have always captivated his imagination.