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Touring the Ordinary: Annette Merrild's The Room

Michael Borowski

“Do you want to get to know the world? Then start with your neighbor.”

Following this proverb Annette Merrild began, in 2001, photographing her neighbor’s living rooms in a Hamburg apartment complex. Over the next four years she expanded her study to include living rooms from cities across Europe. Her series of images show unique details within homogenized apartment spaces. The residents themselves are never photographed. Instead the viewer interprets how others live through the objects and decoration of the space. As a part of a larger archive project, these photographs become associated with scientific documentation. But they equally illustrate the mediums objective limits. The Room attempts to disprove cultural stereotypes with a more intimate view into foreign peoples homes, but this over simplifies the possibilities of their message. Merrild's study of domestic interiors raises important questions about stereotypes and representations of foreign culture. The Room transforms the viewer into both a tourist and a guest in a home. In this way, it illustrates the complex range of the familiar and the foreign present in any experience of difference.

Annette Merrild's The Room is part of a growing collection of photographs, interviews, and written descriptions that she calls the “Archive of European Living Rooms”. Her images are exhibited in a fine art context but she also takes on the role of social scientist. Her approach and methods are clearly outlined on her website. The accumulation of interviews in addition to images functions as ethnographic research. Merrild relies on the photographs documentary quality to create both an aesthetic and scientific survey of living spaces. Because the medium approximates human optics it is often, and controversially, associated with the real. Photography has been thought to be the most transparent style of representing reality. The context of a photograph can also lend it credibility, as they are used by scientists, historians, and journalists, as well as artists. Even with digital manipulation, viewers are likely to trust a photograph from the news. Although their level of truth is highly debatable, viewers tend to believe photographs, especially if they are contextualized as journalism or scientific study. The research element of Merrild's work helps identify The Room as a truthful documentation of reality.

Merrild's aesthetic choices support this association with the real even beyond her use of photography and research. The Room follows a photographic tradition of typology studies in which the artist photographs numerous variations on a single theme, or type. This approach became popular among fine art photographers influenced by the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. In their series, the Bechers carefully compose their images so each building is photographed straight on, at equal height and distance, and under similar lighting. This removes the possible narrative qualities of selective focus, lighting, or composition. Within the framework of photography, these are further attempts at stylistic transparency or an objective gaze. Merrild photographs each room from the same position and with a full focal range. She always faces a large window on the opposite wall. Lighting and tonal qualities are consistent throughout. These decisions attempt to erase any emotional or narrative quality that the artists might try to convey, so that details of difference or character can only be attributed to the space itself and its residents. The topographic approach reinforces The Rooms realism.

The Room, just like other topographic series, is not as transparent as it might appear. Despite its assumed objectivity, a photograph may not be fully, or even partially true. Any categorization still shows the makers intentions. Choices in framing, editing, and subject matter are as much a part of an artist’s expression as lighting or focus. Merrild began by looking at something close to her. Some of her choices were circumstantial. Choosing to photograph German apartments was due to her living in Hamburg. It seems likely that choosing middle income, high-rise apartments was also due to her place of residence. The next phase of the series came while working in New York. Here she photographed similar apartments that her friends were living in. All artists are influenced by what is familiar to them. For Merrild, these parameters were set before the larger concept had taken shape. Due to the responses she received from these first images she decided to expand the project to include households across Europe. Merrild claims to search for “typical country representatives” among the middle class. But in order to maintain the uniformity of the topographic study, she must select apartments that conform to the aesthetics of the Hamburg and New York rooms. Merrild's intent is to expose and reject stereotypes of how foreign people live. Through her research and aesthetic choices she would have her audience believe that homes across Europe are very similar. But her artistic decisions show that she is also making a statement about our concept of home and stereotypes.

In his book Home: a short history of an idea, Witold Rybczynski traces the concept of home (“hejm” or “ham”), as both a place and a state of being, to Northern Europe. Here, during the 17th Century, homes first acquired a sense of privacy, and then intimacy. The family identity became more connected with the home and resulted in domesticity. It’s not surprising that paintings of still lives and interiors were popular in the Netherlands during the 17th Century. These artists were beginning to express this idea of home by painting common objects or domestic activities. Made for a growing middle class, these images are concerned with common, domestic lives situated within the home. The viewer is informed about the family and their lives through the objects represented. Floris van Dijck’s Breakfast Still Life tells us about the morning ritual of eating as a family. Even though there are no figures one would guess by the abundance of food that this is a large social meal of a family living comfortably. Merrild uses this same approach in her photographs. The residents of the apartments are absent, but the audience can imagine their everyday lives through the objects displayed. Books, an ashtray, musical instruments, a pet’s toy or the ever-present television indicate their choice of relaxing activities. Their personalities come through their choices of decoration. This series represents homes across a range of European cities but it says less about architectural choices than decorative ones. Through objects The Room represents people, their lives, and how they create comfort and a sense of home.

Home is a place of comfort and comfort comes from familiarity, much like being able to find a light switch in the dark. A home is a private space but, within each home, different rooms serve different functions. Merrild's choice to photograph the living room is important. The living room is a border between public and private space. It is both a place for the family to relax away from the outside world and for receiving guests. Even before being photographed these rooms have been decorated and organized with a viewer in mind. Although living rooms are not typically open to unknown guests, they are organized for other’s viewing. Living rooms express a sense of home to guests. This requires the visitor to find comfort in a foreign space. All comfortable living rooms have familiar elements. Merrild's photographs support the belief that living rooms should be adequately lit and have comfortable seating, enough for a small social gathering. They should have entertainment options in case conversation lags. They also should make use of plants, art and other decoration to express the family’s tastes. The visitor makes these assumptions because they are the familiar rules of their own home. For a living room to be comfortable it should be relatively similar to one’s own. A living rooms success as a public extension of a homes comfort greatly depends on its familiarity.

It can’t be assumed that Merrild's photographs equal the living rooms themselves. It must be asked whether her images express the same comfort the spaces intend. Despite the fact that these homes are in very different European cities, the audience feels familiar with these rooms. It doesn’t matter if they themselves live in an apartment building. The familiarity comes from the topographic repetition of the images. It doesn’t take long to expect the square room with a large window on the back wall. Because of this repetition the layout of the apartments quickly become familiar, but there are also differences. While the architectural structures are homogenous and each room has many familiar objects, small and unique decorative details emerge. These keep the audiences attention and offer a narrative of how different people, in different countries, decorate and organize familiar spaces. Even though living rooms are meant to comfort through familiarity, they also require some differences. Guests expect some unique identity of that family to show through. Imagine the unsettling scene of walking into another family’s living room, only to discover it is an exact replica of your own. When looking at Merrild's images the viewer settles into the comforting familiarity of the repeating rooms, but the story is told through these unfamiliar elements.

Merrill’s images are about the design and expression of home, but they also offer a view of foreign places. The Room began by comparing apartments in Hamburg and New York City, but has since included cities as varied as Manchester, Tallinn, and Istanbul. While looking at Merrild's photographs the viewer becomes a tourist. Tourism, as a leisure activity among Europeans, became popular during the 19th century when transportation technology improved. Photography, which was gaining mass appeal at the time, is connected to this history. As it became easier for the middle classes to travel, it also became economical to create their own representations of a place through photography. Although people travel for many different reasons, at its core is an exposure to new and foreign places, people and culture. For many travelers the further the distance and the more exotic the culture, the more meaningful the exposure is thought to be. Photography became a useful tool for showing the exotic to people back home. Postcards are synonymous with this and remain a symbol of tourism. But, like photography, tourism imposes limits on the range of reality. In order to comprehend the foreign it must first be simplified. Foreign cultures, as identified through tourism and photography, are often simplified through stereotypes. These stereotypes are what Merrild would like to expose and challenge.

Tourists are a lot like guests in a living room, relying on both the familiar and the foreign to understand their environment. While in another’s living room the guest understands that their table is different from his or her own, but still identifies it as a table. If the experience of visiting a living room is primarily familiar but accentuated by the foreign, a tourist takes the opposite approach. Tourists expect the exotic, but rely on familiar stereotypes to comprehend that strangeness. If the balance sways too far towards one of these the experience becomes uncomfortable, either too boring or too frightening. Merrild would like to challenge the stereotypes imposed on other cultures but in some way they are essential to experience the foreign. Her photographs illustrate that people from other countries live in very familiar spaces. But given the city of origin the viewer can’t help but look for signs that reinforce stereotypes.The danger comes, like any blind faith, from accepting these simplifications as totalities, and refusing to allow our expectations to be challenged. The Room does more than disprove cultural stereotypes; it also illustrates a desire for them.

Much like the terror of encountering an exact double of one’s own home, there is a fear that foreign places might be exactly the same as those back home. Tourism in a globalized world is faced with a paradox. Means of transportation and communication are improving. People and businesses are increasingly mobile. Economies and cultures have more and more influence on one another, and places are starting to look more and more the same. Cities that rely on tourism have to decide how to balance modernizing their own economies while keeping the exotic qualities that draw visitors. If a place is assumed to be too familiar it can lose its appeal. This can result in creating a spectacle of traditional culture that mimics and reinforces its own stereotypes. These are fueled by fixed notions of the familiar and the foreign. The tourist expects the familiar to be located at home, and the foreign to be located away. It is important to critically examine the role of tourism, photography and stereotypes in the context of the familiar and the foreign, not as a binary but as a range of individual experience. As a series, The Room encourages this questioning. But if assumed to be transparent representations of reality they simply confirm that foreign places are becoming more the same. They only ask the viewer to consider the room and not the photograph itself, and push the issue of stereotypes aside. Merrild's photographs are more intimate than typical tourist imagery. This intimacy should not be taken as a sign of truth, but instead remind the viewer that living rooms, photographs, and personal identity are all constructions that rely on simplifying difference; by making the foreign appear familiar. If The Room does not truthfully express the range of the real, its strength is in pointing out that failure.

Annette Merrild's photographs challenge our notions of the familiar and the foreign, but not by taking one side. Her work could easily be read as an illustration of globalization and homogenized cultures, which by now is its own stereotype. But instead of telling us that stereotypes don’t exist, The Room allows the viewer to search for them and feel both relief and disappointment when they are absent. Merrild's series is much more powerful because of these contradictions. I was introduced to The Room while it was on exhibit at Istanbul Modern in 2009. Istanbul is a very appropriate, but controversial venue for this work. Merrild's choice to include Istanbul in her Archive of European Living Rooms indicates her belief that Turkey, or at least Istanbul, is European. Many educated, financially stable visitors of Istanbul Modern would agree. However a large number of more traditional, Islamic migrants might not feel the same way. And it’s because of them that the E.U. has doubts. The danger that comes with agreeing too quickly with The Rooms global sameness is applicable to Turkey. The nation is famous for being the bridge between East and West but, like a bridge, must maintain both sides to keep from collapsing.