What mystical manual is this? Michael Schmelling’s The Plan features a pair of polygons on its cover and a few cryptic lines on its back cover.
Remember the voice in your head that has been saying for years, ‘There has to be something better than this’? I heard the same voices asking me the same hard questions a while back, and once I got honest with myself, my path in life took a drastic change towards the course of my destiny.
Inside the book, arranged in chapters by location (Astoria, Dallas, Yonkers) are over 500 pages of photographs on newsprint. Photographs of chicken cookbooks, Dilbert calendars, loose change, Maxell tapes and other ephemera. What is this? The only clue lies on the last page, which explains that the photographs document various homes photographed in the company of Disaster Masters, a New York based agency that specializes in cleaning homes and counseling compulsive hoarders.
The Plan is hypnotic. As a document of compulsion, it is, well, thoroughly compulsive. “Working through this chaos,” Schmelling’s publisher writes, the photographer “illuminates the random sentimentality that can infuse one’s belongings.” The book takes its name from Disaster Masters’ toll-free number (1-800-THE PLAN) and examines the manifold ways, both troubling and fascinating, in which humans interact with their possessions.
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i always like what you have to say molly, take me along book shopping!
Thanks! If I ever turn into a compulsive hoarder, books will be my downfall.
such beautiful pictures of wonderfully arranged objects! thanks for sharing..