Photographer Barbara Iweins cataloged all 12,795 items in her house. This is what she found

After likely by way of a divorce and moving household for the 11th time, Barbara Iweins made the decision to take inventory of her lifetime — and everything in it.

Going from area to place, she put in just about 5 a long time documenting each individual solitary object she owns, from free Lego bricks and old keychains to distant controls, kitchen area utensils and miscellaneous knick-knacks.

The resulting 12,795 photos offer an personal, unfiltered portrait of the Belgian photographer. Her warts-and-all approach — a vibrator and a dentist’s mildew of her tooth are between the numerous individual things in the inventory — is just about the antithesis of present-day social media, whereby customers carefully curate what they expose to the world.

Amid her most surprising finds was the abundance of steel combs used to extract headlice from her 3 kids’ hair. “It can be something we are losing all the time, and I found I experienced 6 or seven of these factors,” she said. “I was shocked by all the items that I was dropping all the time and re-shopping for.”

An case in point of the several products that attribute in Barbara Iweins’ “Katalog.” Credit rating: Barbara Iweins

The project has prompted the photographer to mirror on her have materialism — and society’s consumerism at big. She estimates that 121,046 euros (around $124,000) was expended on her home’s entire contents, however her stock discovered that just 1% of objects held sentimental worth. Nevertheless she retains what she phone calls a “relationship” with her 1000’s of belongings.

“It really is a minor bit unfortunate,” she stated. “And I totally recognize, since my close friends are largely vacationers and they actually look at me with a little bit of pity — but owning (a connection with my issues) reassures me.”

And although a self-professed “neurotic collector,” the photographer does not think about herself a hoarder. “I give a large amount absent, I don’t acquire excessively — I imagine I’m a regular person,” she explained.

“I know it is a ton,” she included. “But I believed it would be far more.”

An act of ‘self-preservation’

And though frequently mundane in isolation, unique shots have the tales of her lifestyle: The salacious novel she took from her father’s library aged 16, the medical center bracelet she wore when offering start or the anti-panic medication she commenced taking in her early 40s.

Above the a long time, Iweins focused an common of 15 hrs a week to the challenge. Bringing get to the chaos grew to become a kind of “therapy” that assisted her overcome not only her divorce but the subsequent demise of her boyfriend.

“When I begun, I truly thought that I was fatigued of moving home and relocating my stuff all over,” she stated. “And then I realized that it wasn’t about that at all. It was extra like an act of self-preservation — that performing a little something (for the collection) each individual working day was genuinely about arranging my life in my head. It was a favourable course of action.

“Now that the task is accomplished, and I have identified which objects are beneficial, I can begin residing,” she added. “Everything was there for a reason, I guess.”