Marcel Winatschek

Enclosed: Living Small

I spent a few months in Tokyo and walked into my apartment after a long flight ready to cry. Gave up a much larger place in Berlin for a room barely bigger than the bed, a sink, a TV. But it could’ve been worse. It definitely was worse for plenty of people.

A photographer named Won Kim spent time in Japan, Finland, Australia, Sri Lanka, the US, and the Netherlands documenting people in the smallest rooms in the world. He called it Enclosed: Living Small. The rooms are the real subjects here—tight, dark, crammed. Not spaces. Just cells.

Some of the rooms Kim photographed are almost monastic, sparse enough you’d guess the occupant was just passing through. Others are completely packed: clothes everywhere, improvised bookshelves, decoration wedged into every corner. What interested him was that contrast—how some people let the space define them, and others refuse.

You could accept that you live in a box and keep it empty. But some people fill theirs anyway. They argue with the walls. They make the space say something about them.