Bryan and Nicole's new old house

My friends Bryan and Nicole are in the process of buying their first home in Portland's Hawthorne neighborhood. It's a fixer, so they've been spending the past few weeks gutting and remodeling before they move in. Bryan has been documenting the process with Holga and flash:










I love the low-brow aesthetic. Anyone who does a home improvement project makes photographs along the way. The Before and After photographs are a remodeling tradition which Bryan has adopted in his own way, driven as much by documentary interest as by the need to make art photography. One could hardly pick a more personal subject to document than one's home. For Bryan and Nicole, these images are charged with importance. They mean something.

Regardless of subject matter the photographs are wonderfully mysterious, with great color and form. The vignetting gives them the appearance of planets in space or objects in a microscope, but instead of some exotic locale they're right there buried in the walls. Within a month they'll be reburied but not before the camera sweeps in.