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Crime Observation

An Archive of Ordinary Rooms

Nine thousand photographs of nothing in particular, and what they turned out to hold.

Sunlight falling through tall trees onto a forest path.
Demo image · Unsplash

Between 1971 and 2003 a municipal surveyor photographed the interior of every room he was sent to assess. He was not documenting anything. He was recording condition for a file.

What survived

The files were pulped. The negatives were not, because nobody had written a rule about negatives.

What they show

Not architecture. What people had on their walls, what they were sitting on, and what they had chosen to keep in a room they did not expect anyone to photograph.

End of article

Coverage Crime Observation

About the author

Anamika Gaur

Photographer

Photographs interiors, work, and the objects people keep.

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Discussion 6 comments

Shobha Rangappa Pinned 3 hours ago

Nineteen public consultations and counting. The treatment-plant utilisation number is the one nobody publishes, and it is the only one that would tell you whether any of this works.

Anamika Gaur Author 2 hours ago

They published it at 4:15pm. I've added it to the piece as an update rather than a correction, since nothing in the original was wrong; it was simply unanswered.

Vasanthi Kumar 5 hours ago

The cascade point deserves more attention than it usually gets. Restoring a lake in isolation is a real improvement to that lake and almost nothing to the system.

Comment removed

A. Menon 6 hours ago

Even so, the diversion drains are doing something; they buy time while the plants get built.

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