introduction.
“Peaches, what’s the best thing about living in Brooklyn?” asks the text scrawled, in marker, across the bottom of the photos of Peaches Geldof’s place. Switching colors, she answers back: “The lights when you cross the Brooklyn bridge, and the Spanish gangsters at the bagel shop who hit on me…also Max Drummey.” Charmingly multi-colored, with doodles, scribbles, and little pictures, the throwback handwritten text (compared to the usual typed text found on the Internet) fits right in with the goal of The Selby. As the New York Times explains, Todd Selby (a New York based photographer) had a “curiosity about the ways personal space reflects personality”: from that notion, The Selby was born.
The Selby is pictures of people’s spaces and stuff. The pictures are mostly of young, good-looking subjects - “movie directors, fashion models and designers, painters, writers, indie magazine editors,” as the New York Times summarizes it - though the occasional over-40 manages to sneak in. The spaces are, even when messy, artfully messy, as if each stray object had been carefully placed there. The visits aren’t surprises; as Brian Lichtenberg explained to the NYT, “[h]e liked being part of Mr. Selby’s project…because ‘it was a good excuse to make the apartment tidy and nice.’”
The sheer aesthetic pleasure of these shots is almost overwhelming. Photography dates back to the 1820s; it is refreshing to see an old medium presented in a new way (online). Photographs have long been accepted as a system of signs (see Jonathan Bignell’s Media Semiotics: An Introduction). The subjects of these photographs, as said before, are mostly young; even those that are not young (Tom Wolfe, here’s to you) are distinguished and expertly weathered, notable, or all of the above. The subjects all seem to share two things: quite a bit of money, and spaces that are surreal in their fantasticness. As Krysten Ritter, model-turned-actress, exclaims in the NYT article, “‘Every day I’m, like, really? Is this really our house?’” Yes, yes it is.
