Room & Board: The Bedroom and Weeknight Dinners | Lois Bielefeld, Photographer

September 12, 2014 - November 8, 2014

“I explore the rituals that define us, exploring what habits and personal spaces can reveal about our private selves.” -Lois Bielefeld

The central motif of Lois Bielefeld’s work is the conceptual portrait. She focuses on a connective idea that ties a group of people together and explores the human qualities that we all share. There are things we all do, eat and sleep for example, but the rituals surrounding those activities and how we define the spaces for partaking in them vary and can be telling.

The Bedroom (2008-2012) is comprised of 103 portraits that provides a voyeuristic view into one of the most private spaces that we all have. Bielefeld started the series while sharing her bedroom in a small Brooklyn apartment for one year with her daughter, and regularly thought about how each side of their bedroom reflected who they were.

The focus of Weeknight Dinners is the typical at home meal, when food and space often become secondary to the busy workday. The series started in 2013 and is currently in progress. Bielefeld is revisiting some of the same subjects from The Bedroom and taking another look into their habits and space, but often 2-3 years later. She is also photographing new subjects for the series. Currently there are 53 images in the series.