Triggered!: Adam Hoff

Yellow Basement, ©Adam Hoff

By Adam Hoff

This photograph was part of a series of images that I first began to create in 2001. During this time I was working as a photo assistant in a large furniture catalog photo studio where we were building a lot of room sets to photograph the furniture in. I initially began making the images as a kind of impulsive artistic experiment. I wanted to see what it would look like to photograph interiors of burning rooms, and since this is difficult to do in an actual house, I decided to build my own true-to-scale miniatures. 

A few years later I was invited to expand and exhibit the series in a gallery in Chicago. Around this time, my parents informed me that they were moving out of my childhood home, the space where I grew up and where I had lived for over 20 years. With this in mind, I decided to construct and model the rooms after the actual look and feel of my parents’ house and the act of burning these rooms began to take on a much different meaning for me. It provided an opportunity to process emotions for a place that had been so central to my growth as a person but also to my artistic development as a photographer -- emotions both negative and positive that without this project may have gone unexplored. 

This particular yellow room was modeled after my parents' basement, a space where my brothers and friends and I spent countless hours over the years.

To see more of Adam’s works, click here.