A couple of years ago, Tanja Hollander started posting about her unusual new art project: traveling the world, photographing every one of her Facebook friends in their homes.
It started on New Year’s Eve 2010, when Hollander was writing a letter to a friend in Afghanistan, IMing another in Jakarta, and perusing Facebook for updates on her (then) 626 digital friends.
All that complicated communication kindled a question inside her: How many of these people to whom she was linked were really her friends? Some of them she hadn’t even met.
She set about to find out. Thus began “Are You Really My Friend?”
I volunteered for Hollander’s project in part because I’d written about Facebook, and friendship, and sometimes the intersection of the two, and because I’d gone to college with her. (For the record, I was intimidated by her; she seemed to have the confidence of a leopard.)
Why was it important to photograph people in their domiciles? “Your environment reveals so much about you,” she tells me. People’s cabinets, or their piles of stuff—she knew them better through all their architectural and spacial intimacies.
Which was part of my trepidation about participating—what would my rent-stabilized, semi-falling apart Brooklyn apartment say about me?
Don’t worry, Hollander assured me—the homes come out looking better on film than they do in real life.
Hollander, who lives in a renovated farmhouse on 1.5 acres in Auburn, ME, is on a kind of permanent house tour. The project, she says, is as much a portrait of the spaces as it is the people in them. “You can take the people out of the pictures, and they’d still be interesting pictures.”
Going into people’s homes changed what had been her fairly narrow definition of friendship. “A friend was somebody you had over for dinner and drank a little too much red wine and argued about politics with and still woke up friends in the morning,” she says.
She encountered the generosity of near strangers and people she hadn’t seen for decades, who gave her keys to their apartments and offered her meals: There were so many different versions and varieties of friends.
The people she visited felt that way, too. There’s an intimacy, a trust, that builds while sitting still for the full second it takes for the shutter to close, staring straight ahead at Hollander. And, no, she doesn’t use a digital camera for her project about friendship in the digital age.
Hollander has now photographed 460 friends in 43 states and eight countries. Some of their homes have been cozy, some imposing; one was even a refurbished delivery truck. (She now has 1,451 friends but is photographing only the original 636—otherwise it would be a Sisyphean task.)
What Hollander says about everybody’s homes looking really good on film turned out to be true. In addition to gushing over the portrait Hollander made of my family, my own Facebook friends gushed about my apartment. “Where did you get that white shag rug?” one friend asks.
“It was on clearance on Overstock,” I say. “It’s stained and filled with food and gum.”
Luckily, the camera didn’t show that.
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