EMPTY APARTMENTS

[ view the project online ]

Empty Apartments is an online curatorial project featuring 125,000 images of apartments pulled from Craigslist. It forms a record of vernacular American rental architecture and the anonymous landlord-photographers who took them. The familiar and the strange mark these images: repeating patterns of glowing windows in under-lit rooms, the same kitchen setups over-and-over, blurry shots of wood floors, and HDR images of fancy apartment complexes. The photographs are presented en-masse, sorted algorithmically by visual similarity.

This project was made in collaboration with Angeles Cossio.

A screenshot of the project.
Visitors can pan and zoom to explore the images.
Photographs, after much manual culling, were sorted by visual similarity.
Whatever was on hand, placed to make the room feel less empty.
The geometric pleasure of freshly vacuumed carpet (there are thousands of these) and an incredible hot-tub.
The photographer, accidentally revealed.

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