Fraction: Sarah, thank you so much for sharing your beautiful book project, Personal History, with the Fraction community!

You have such a keen eye, and technical skill, for capturing environments in dynamic ways. You’re able to convey a mood, or to personify the character of each space through your attention to color, object, focus, angle of view. Can you describe the development of your photographic style and interests?

Sarah Malakoff: I’ve been obsessed with interior spaces for as long as I can remember.  I was always re-arranging the furniture as a kid and and, looking back, it seems to have been an effort to transform my surroundings at a time when not much else was in my power.  My favorite places were the period rooms in museums.  I would examine the details and imagine the dramas that may have played out.  Furniture and interiors even figured prominently in my dreams and nightmares, always in vivid color which shows up in my work.  So, I always connected interiors with imagination and story-telling. Surrealist painters, particularly some of the women like Remedios Varo were some early art influences.  Their images are colorful, narrative, and use domestic objects as symbols. 

F: I’d love to learn about the evolution of this particular project – how did it begin, and how did it progress over time?

SM: There have been different themes that have intrigued me as I work.  My first book, Second Nature, looked at the home as both a refuge from and a reinvention of the outside, natural world. While shooting, other objects started catching my attention.  I noticed the portraits that are hung in the home and was fascinated by who they represent, what the connection might be to the occupant, and the relationship to other items and architecture.  A good number of the portraits, much more than I would have thought, were of figures from history- Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Yuri Gagarin.  With this in mind, I started looking for other possessions that reference historical events and locations.  I found these things and their placement within the home variously humorous, touching, and sometimes disturbing. 

F: The details in each image are rich. You have a great use of line, shape, and repetition to move the viewer through the composition to each tack-sharp element. How do you find these aesthetic and technical decisions serving or supporting the content of the images?  

SM: I think the perspective and tight cropping draws the viewer into the space and the large depth of field calls attention to all the items in the frame. I hope that repeated viewing reveals more details, that there are new objects and relationships to discover.  I may emphasize particular possessions with the lighting or scale, but it’s the juxtaposition of those objects with others and placement within the architecture of the room that fascinates me — that the Alamo nightlight is next to a bathroom with saloon doors, that a replica of The Horse of Selene from the Parthenon is in a modern, disorienting kitchen with Kyra Sedgwick in an episode of The Closer on the TV, that a print of the Pyramids of Giza is displayed in a woodsy cabin.

F:  Is there a particular manner in which you seek out spaces, or scout locations? How much control, or lack thereof, over a space and the potential composition do you generally exert? How do you find a balance between staging and relinquishing control?

SM: I’ve found homes in a variety of ways- from a Zoom lecture by someone at home during the pandemic to a friend relating the tale of a first date who mentioned a boat bar in his basement.  Mostly, I find homes through word of mouth. I end up at family of friends and friends of family. Sometimes I will put out a call for specific things and often people report on interesting places they think I might like.  

The amount of staging can vary a lot.  Often, it’s about removing extraneous items or tidying up, trying to simplify the composition.  Since I can only take in a portion of the room, I will also occasionally move something from another wall or maybe even another room if it fits with the idea.  But generally, I’m inspired by things within the space.

F: The objects and environments in Personal History, present an array of symbols and signifiers that pose important questions about the nature of private and public collections, and the development of collective and personal identity through such mechanisms. The interior domestic spaces also speak to political and social structures, seen and unseen hierarchies, and more broadly to ideas of ownership and power. There is so much to unpack in each space, and to the body of work as a whole. What driving forces were present as you were putting together the final edit and sequence of images? 

SM: I love your list of issues and they were certainly things I was thinking about addressing in the work.  I wanted to look at the various ways these things come up and weave them throughout, to present a certain idea and have it repeated and emphasized later in the sequence.

Some possessions, as I’ve mentioned, memorialize important or, perhaps more accurately, well-known figures in history.  For example, there is the painting of George Washington suspended above a double bed; a collection of Jackie Onassis memorabilia and books in a Pepto-Bismol pink room; a bust of Caesar on a light-up Ionic column with a practice golf set propped beside it which became the cover.  

A print of Tuskegee Airmen flying in formation above a sofa with a tabby cat pillow recalls both a proud legacy and evidence of racism and segregation.  Other items also refer to wars and it remains a mystery whether there is a family connection, an interest in that part of history, or a desire to seem knowledgeable.  There is a model of the USS Missouri, a game with Snoopy as the Red Baron, an Afghan War Rug, and a VHS video set on the Cold War.

Allusions to colonization are seen in a nostalgic embrace of the American past.  A Native American Chief painted on black velvet is a questionable appropriation that is amplified by the cowboy-themed wallpaper on which it hangs.  Matching lamps made from models of the Santa Maria flank a comfortable sofa.  

I think through the edit and sequence there is an uneasy vacillating between heroism and kitsch, patriotism and colonialism, personal connections and the desire to appear worldly.

F: You photograph each space as a portrait, yet the images are void of people, and in that sense each space is anonymous. How does anonymity play into the reading of the works?

SM: I’m do see the photos as portraits of the inhabitants and yet, I consider the subjects to be fictional characters (even when based on the real occupants.). I want the viewer to imagine who might live there rather than revealing that in a direct way.  I want the objects and spaces to read as clues to identity, aspirations, desires, and fears.  And, with multiple images in a series, I think they speak to the broader cultural concerns.

F: I love the size of the book – it allows the full color, detail, and richness of each photograph to come through. Could you share insight into your process of collaborating with the design team? 

SM: It was important to me that the book be fairly large for those exact reasons.  The exhibition prints are 20”x 24” and 30”x 40” so I never worried about the little details being legible.  With the book, that was a concern.  Basically, the design stemmed from wanting each image to be as big as possible, keeping one image per spread and horizontals spanning the gutter. I also loved some of the smaller, intricate patterns in the images: the cowboys on the Native American Chief image, the Southern plantation wallpaper, the Paul Revere’s ride upholstery, the grenades, helicopters, and machine guns on the Afghan War Rug.  I made close-ups of those and with the designer- Lisa Dreschel, who was fantastic, we made full-bleed pages to spread throughout and function almost as chapter breaks.

F: Personal History is a gorgeous, thought-provoking book. Thank you so much for sharing!