Cataloging
A Dream
House

I have only ever seen that house in a few surviving pictures, some rescued by my grandpa that day, and in a Super 8 film my dad shot: the house in black and white, flickering across the screen like an image of memory itself. The decor of the house they eventually built in its place was its near opposite. All maximalist color, each room was a wildly different palette, like walking through variously hued rooms in Emerald City; like inhabiting a story that takes sudden twists and turns. I would come to associate the first house with the farm’s past lives that I never knew—both the stories I was told when I was a kid and the ones I was not allowed to hear until I was much older.

Later, when I was beginning to look at photographs seriously—to tell stories based on them, to try to make them myself, and eventually, to write about them—I thought of this time again. I couldn’t have articulated it as a child, but this place was where I first felt the sensation that I was living inside a picture.

The Sears catalog was mailed to far-flung rural addresses and priced within the realm of the people who lived there. Both young Willie Nelson in Texas and also a young Doc Watson bought their first guitars out of its pages; Watson grew up within twenty-five miles from my grandparents’ house in North Carolina. In the Jim Crow era, when visiting an actual storefront held danger and menace for Black Americans, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, and numerous other Delta blues musicians bought their first Stella guitars from Sears.

I used to believe that my grandma, Evelyn, had ordered the entire contents of the new house straight out of its pages too, but this was furniture-making western North Carolina before most of the factories were shuttered. My father says she bought most things from stores in town. Still, she’d grown up the only girl in a household of boys in a hardworking farming family, and her mother didn’t have time to waste on pretty things. If Evelyn had an interiors magazine, it was the Sears catalog.

The catalog was far from ideal; its pages did not depict images of many people who ordered from it, but it did, in some way, assist in democratizing dreams. In her 1994 memoir, Dolly Parton describes growing up in a house of a dozen kids in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, honing a "country girl's vision of what glamour was." The pages of the Sears-Roebuck catalog acted as her guide.

Down the road in equally rural Bacon County, Georgia, the catalog was a creative portal for Harry Crews, who used his upbringing as the foundation of his brilliantly weird Southern Gothic novels. A sharecropper’s kid, he and his best friend, a boy named Willalee Bookatee, would spend hours inventing characters out of the models in its layouts, scripting long-running feuds and fantastic tales of the “hidden but afflicted lives of the people smiling out of its slick pages,” as Crews would recall in A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. “It was no doubt the first step in a life devoted primarily to men and women and children who never lived anywhere but in my imagination.”

I had an echo of this feeling when I first saw the work of William Eggleston. It wasn’t just that his pictures are frequently made in the American South, where I grew up. They hone in on the implicit surreality of the kinds of places and people that are familiar presences in my own life — the clouds, tricycles, cars, fake flowers, his people, even the way he photographs dirt.

Eggleston’s pictures also made me think about certain photographs of Walker Evans, who came before him. The photographs Evans took of the living spaces of working people are some of his most revealing: Evans’s succinct, haunting twelve-photograph book Message from the Interior depicts only two humans. “I like to make you feel that an interior is almost inhabited by somebody,” he said. In the same way, William Eggleston’s interiors often do not require people, suggesting them by their absence. The commercial dye transfer paper Eggleston used in the 1970s to render his supersaturated colors reminded me of the reds and golds in my grandma’s house, and of the reds and golds in the catalog pages. (One of those reds features in the backdrop of “Winston,” a picture in Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest. The photograph shows another young catalog dreamer, the artist’s son, poring over glossy layouts of guns.)

Eggleston is as uncanny at depicting the interior lives of the famous as he is at revealing the vivid strangeness underlying the seemingly commonplace. Take his photographs of Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee. For his eleventh birthday, Elvis wanted a rifle, but his parents bought him a guitar instead—not from the catalog but from a Tupelo, Mississippi hardware store. Like Harry Crews, Elvis grew up in a sharecropper’s shack, the setting that is also among Walker Evans’ most famous interiors. Fast forward to 1974, the year Elvis redecorated much of Graceland, the year after my grandparents moved into their new home. He died in the house in 1977; it was opened to the public in 1982. In 1983, Priscilla Presley invited Eggleston to make a series of photographs.

When I went to visit Eggleston in Memphis in 2008, we moved outside to sit on the steps of his studio so he could smoke. Eggleston remarked, almost out of the blue, that the Graceland commission was one of his most difficult projects. “I don’t know if I’ve ever said this,” he told me. “Maybe I have, to very few.” Over two and a half months he wandered the estate after hours, making long artificially lit exposures, free to go everywhere except where Elvis died. He chose to restrict his pictures to the downstairs area of the house. “That’s the real Graceland,” he explained. “That’s the one people know about and see.”

He photographed the turquoise carpet, the lacquered ashtrays, the mirrors reflecting portraits of Elvis, the thick gold drapes sealing off the house that, in a 1984 Artforum review, Greil Marcus described as “a 1957–77 version of King Tut’s tomb.” Marcus notes that most of Graceland’s visitors, “people who to a real degree share Elvis’s class background,” derisively termed the decor “tacky.” And yet he emphasizes that there is “not a hint of this in Eggleston’s pictures. In the end, what they communicate is an irreducible dignity.”

Quite often, Eggleston told me, he was almost entirely alone in the house. “Sometimes during the night, a brace of maids would come in to thoroughly clean for the next day and it would take them an hour or more. And they swore, each one of them, that they saw Elvis’ ghost.”

At the end of the early aughts I briefly had a semi-recurring copyediting gig at a shopping-oriented shelter magazine. I was a fan of the delightfully, willfully irreverent Nest, which was published between 1997 and 2004, and invited fellow artists to write and photograph inside the homes of genuinely visionary decorators on both million-dollar and dollar-store budgets. I read Apartamento, which published its first issue in 2008, and is still devoted to the homes of artists and eccentrics. Both celebrated unconventional ways of living that valued creativity over capitalism.

Meanwhile the magazine where I worked was both elegant and alien to me, a place whose layouts might feature a kitchen with fabric-covered walls—a kitchen where nobody did any cooking. It was a deliberate quirk of the publication that every shoot would include some element of anomaly, something “unfussy” or “undone” to give the impression of real lives being lived. I scanned the spreads for these on-purpose mistakes like I was playing Photo Hunt at a bar: a rumpled blanket on a sofa, little kids’ shoes left “carelessly” behind, a book face down in mid-read—some evidence of human existence.

These were primarily compositions of objects, without the inherent raw charm of the catalogs I’d grown up with. They weren’t art pictures, of course. They did not transmit a sense of who those humans were. They did not reveal Elvis’s ghost, the way Eggleston’s pictures do.

In other photographs of interiors I would come to find equal spaces of dreaming—among them, the bedrooms and childhood houses Alec Soth wanders into in Sleeping By the Mississippi, and the photographs LaToya Ruby Frazier of her Grandma Ruby’s extensive collection of porcelain dolls at home in the former steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. “Grandma Ruby’s interior design was a firewall that blocked external forces,” Frazier writes in her photobook The Notion of Family. Dreaming is embedded in Deana Lawson’s semi-fictional portraits. Lawson takes the material of life that Eudora Welty, writing of her friend William Eggleston, famously termed the “mundane”— she actively embellishes it with semisecret alterations, infusing her scenes with an aura of cosmological connection.

The subject of Lawson’s photograph Ms. Bell at Home is regal in an emerald silk blouse and cropped burgundy pants that match the tint of her hair and show off her enormous, multicolor space boots. Lawson met Ms. Bell when she was giving a yard sale in Los Angeles—in the resulting portrait, an etched-leaf urn filled with bright gold dried flowers is at her side, and there are racks of clothing that you could imagine Ms. Bell selling or trying on herself. The carpet at her feet is in an oceanic hue. Directly behind her a curtain, perhaps a bedsheet, is hung over a doorway. Behind this curtain, one imagines, are more collected things—signs and signifiers, like the subtext running just below the surface of a short story.

Ms. Bell at Home was part of Lawson’s solo exhibition “Centropy,” at the Guggenheim in New York City, which opened in summer 2021. There it was surrounded by other portraits, many featuring settings and objects often as compelling as their human subjects, a mishmash of aspiration, glamour, and the ordinary—in Ms. Bell’s case, bric-a-brac, clocks, drinking glasses, a Miss Piggy doll.

In a recent profile of Lawson, the writer Jenna Wortham observes that the photographer is deliberately oblique about which elements of the picture—the location, the objects, the clothes, the person—are as she encountered them, and which contain her own additions. Like a writer of fiction, Lawson creates a suspension of disbelief, allowing the viewer to enter the picture much the way she herself did, when she first walked into Ms. Bell’s space, and saw the possibility of a suggested story and a resonance with her own deeply textured approach to a future that carries with it the past.

My relationship to the photography of interiors is wrapped up in what it meant to lose the visual story of a past—what it meant to live in a present that was both a time capsule and also my grandma’s vision of a future. She did not outwardly linger much on past hardships; I absorbed instead the constant looking forward, the sense of futurism that was embedded in the novelty and freedom of the rooms, the style that I associated with the vibrant world of the catalogs, the creative space they made for me. Like most of the inhabitants of the interior photographs I most admired, my grandma was a worker too. When I hear that Lawson told Ms. Bell, “Your living room is the space in my dreams,” I am picturing the room in Ms. Bell’s portrait, and I am also picturing my cousin Bryan inviting me and my sister to his dreamed-up pretend living room in Windy Gap between the sticks and rocks by the hotwire fence.

Elsewhere, in another North Carolina town, the rooms of my maternal grandparents’ house reflected a lifetime of collected art and handmade crafts, accumulated experiences and numerous moves across three different states. But my father’s parents’ house on the farm in Windy Gap was vividly lodged in 1973, the era when my grandparents finally moved into the brick ranch they built themselves to stretch the insurance money from the fire as far as they could. In a seventies world of burnt orange, avocado green, and chocolate brown, it broke all the rules. My grandparents’ room had a cherry red carpet, their bedspread white; when we stayed over, my sister and I slept in a room with a deep blue carpet and a blue floral bedspread, my parents in a room with a grassy green carpet and a green-patterned bedspread. The hallway was carpeted in gold and covered in a plastic runner, continuing into the living room with its gold-flowered sofa against the wood paneling and a painting of a creek running through a forest of changing colors, a picture of ordinary beauty that hung in thousands of living rooms all over the U.S. (Years later I will see a snapshot of six-year-old Kurt Cobain, drawing beneath the same Robert Wood painting; incidentally, Cobain got his first Stella bass guitar from the Sears catalog too.)

My grandma was proud of the olive-green wall-mounted oven (perhaps the only concession to the hues of the time), where she made biscuits and cakes and roasts while my sister and cousin and I folded down corners of the Sears Wish Book, stretching ourselves out on the kitchen linoleum or in the gold-carpeted living room that felt like an extension of the catalog’s saturated, affordable opulence.

This catalog conjuring put us in a trance we would break by sprinting across the gravel road and climbing up a red dirt bank to a little wood just along the pasture. The cows sometimes ambled up to sniff the air near us, then demurred their big noses and eyes away from the electric fence, paying us no more mind as we set about arranging imaginary houses there in the moss and dirt under the trees, mapping out and envisioning each invisible room.

My grandma was proud of the fact that she never missed a day of work, even once turning down a lawyer’s offer to help her sue the company when her hands became infected on the line. Les Blank’s film Chicken Real was made at the plant where she worked, released in 1970, the year after the house burned. One Christmas a year after her death, my family watched Chicken Real, looking for her in the footage. We couldn’t find Evelyn, but we did see traces of the exterior world she also inhabited, the one that helped her decorate the house we knew. Then we rewatched my father’s handful of Super 8 films. She walks up the gravel farm road with her purse and her lunch pail and a big smile on her face, heading home.

Rebecca Bengal is a writer of fiction and nonfiction currently living in Brooklyn.