If your house suddenly caught on fire, what would you grab as you fled out the door? That’s precisely the question Foster Huntington asked himself, so he gathered the belongings he himself would take and photographed them, then asked a few friends to do the same. Then, on May 10 of 2011, he launched The Burning House with 10 such photographs. Within a few hours, he got his first submission from a complete stranger. Within a few days, he was making headlines. But he soon realized the self-selection implicit to the project engendered a certain psychographic homogeneity in the responses he was receiving and, driven to make people of various walks of life feel included, he decided to seek out more diverse submissions himself.
So, for five months, he drove thousands of miles up and down the West Coast and around the Rockies, in search for people “other than typical blog readers,” in an effort to expand the project generationally, geographically, and socioeconomically. Using Richard Avedon’s In the American West as inspiration, he set out to find those rare specimens who “had never heard of Tumblr, had never seen an iPad” — in other words, the kinds of people with whom he would’ve never crossed paths had he stayed in Manhattan. The results — rich, surprising, refreshingly human, from people separated by 80 years and spanning six continents — are now gathered in The Burning House: What Would You Take? (public library), based on the Tumblr of the same name and a fine addition to this running list of blog-turned-book success stories.
Check out the article here and the Tumblr here!
An original post from The Burning House:
The Burning House
If my house was burning I would take with me:
- Tivoli Pal radio, so I can listen to some news & music
- Lubitel medium format camera I got from my girlfriend
- Leatherman, has proven its weight in gold
- Some rolls of 120-film, to actually use the camera
- My wallet, money is always helpful
- iPhone, for making calls
- Hard drive with a backup of everything on my computer, most importantly photos and design projects
- Passport, so I can prove I’m me
- Moleskine journals, used and new
- Pen & pencil, follows my moleskines everywhere
- Calendar my girlfriend made, I really like it
- A messenger bag to carry it all, my favorite one
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