At Home With the Interesting

Todd Selby has the best job: he goes to the homes and studios of artists, designers, and people who live in ways that betray a lifetime of paying attention, and photographs them there. The concept is simple enough that the quality of the subjects does all the work. Some of them inhabit spaces so layered and strange and specifically their own that you could spend an hour just studying the background—not the curated minimalism of a styled shoot but the real thing, overflowing bookshelves and pinned drawings and objects that have migrated through years of accumulation.

The Selby launched around 2008 and immediately became one of those sites you kept returning to. Mark Hunter at The Cobrasnake was among the first to flag it, which makes sense—there’s the same voyeuristic charge of getting access, of seeing where someone actually lives and what that reveals. The difference is that Selby’s subjects tend to be older, stranger, more deliberately built. Their spaces don’t say "I go to good parties." They say "I have been constructing this world for years."

It made me look at my own apartment differently. What would a photograph of my desk right now say about me? I decided I’d rather not know.