Our house is featured in the July 2013 online issue of Ikea Family Live Magazine, a digital publication of Inter IKEA Systems B.V. The mag’s editor Helen reached out to me via email and asked if we’d like to be featured. When I accepted, she sent me a digital package containing photo guidelines, interview questions and FTP instructions.
I styled our place myself. I used my Canon Rebel XT and my 18-55mm kit lens to take the shots, used my free Gimp download to gently edit the shots, and used my brain and rusty writing voice to craft some explanation of the crazy that is our place. And our place is crazy, make no mistake.
My interview emphasizes how well our space suits our needs, and it does, but we have to constantly stay on top of* the clutter or all bets are off. I spent quite a while staging these photos, and like any other magazine, they show our place at its tidiest.
I thought it would be funny to look at the shots in the mag, taken after a day of staging, and compare them with shots of the same rooms taken with my iPhone on a normal day.
These comparisons make me laugh so hard. If all magazines published “reality” shots, Pinterest stress would be a thing of the past. But in that case I suppose no one would be inspired to do any better. This process reaffirmed for me that beauty exists in my life, in every moment and every where: in a car held together with duct tape, in the weeds dotting our lawn, in a flea market painting of a cat and a family room bursting at the seams with mess/life.
——————————————–
*”staying on top of” may or may not involve yelling, semi-violent pile-making, and the waving around of trash bags in a menacing fashion.