MIRIAM BÄCKSTRÖM
Miriam Bäckström's new series "Apartments II" makes me feel like a peeping Tom. Though they resemble Bäckström's earlier photographs of interiors built on soundstages, the twenty C-prints are actual everyday living environments. When a friend of mine mentions that her own bedroom is the subject of one of the pictures, my initial and not entirely unseemly scopophilia seems to turn into something shameful. Innocent, everyday things—bookshelves, clean laundry—make me blush. Though she flirts with photography's classic function as a preserver of memory via uninflected documentation, here purported objectivity never goes untweaked. These images, coolly detached, unpopulated by human figures, and nearly Wallpaper-ish in their stylish emptiness, will soon become part of a production company's archive, where they will serve as reference material for the design of film sets. In a neat inversion, the truth will become fiction. But maybe it's not really an inversion at all: As these images attest, the spaces we inhabit are just another form of artifice, set designs in which we act out the movies of our lives.