Brain Pickings

Junk Drawers: Portraits of People Through Their Trinkets

You can tell a lot about a person by their most invaluable possession — those quirky trinkets and sentimental keepsakes we all keep in a box or drawer somewhere, a timecapsule of all we’ve ever romanticized and treasured. Brittny Badger (whose deconstructed household appliances we swooned over a few months ago) calls these trinket timecapsules Junk Drawers and she photographs them, capturing indirect portraits of their owners though the tchotchkes they’ve accumulated over the years.

The goal of this series is to turn chaos into organization.” ~ Brittny Badger

'brittny' | Objects taken from the desk drawer in Badger's own room in her parents' house.

'kelly and brittny' | Objects taken from the desk drawer in the apartment Badger and her roommate currently live in.

'lori and vern' | Objects taken from Badgers' parents' desk drawer

The series reflects the same horror vacui folk-art-inspired technique you may recall from Polish photographer Andrzej Kramarz’s series Things.

We’d love to see the junk drawers of some of today’s cultural icons. We bet Paola Antonelli’s alone is a micro-museum of awesome.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.