On a sunny afternoon, Kirk and Barbie Perry's front yard in Metamora is full of their treasured possessions. A bookcase with some novels, a sofa, a television and a grill dot the lawn. But this isn’t a yard sale. It’s a photo shoot.
A photography project 20 years in the making aims to capture people's lives through their things, from remote parts of rural China, to the streets of San Jose, to this Metamora lawn.
Barbie Perry says it’s an emotional experience to see the items that make up her life meticulously arranged.
“It’s been a roller coaster. Sometimes I’ve been very nervous, sometimes I’m very excited,” she said. “And the process today is, I’m finding it challenging for me to not want to tell them how to do stuff with my stuff.”
The Perrys' stuff is in experienced hands. Two movers place objects on the lawn under the direction of photographer Qingjun Huang. The company Movewise already collaborated with Huang on a few projects, but this is the first one for mover Damion Smith.
“A normal moving gig, we normally just go on in and take everything out, but here they just point at what we need to take out,” he said. “But my experience so far, it’s a little weird, but it’s actually like a good thing they’re doing in the area. So it’s pretty cool.”
Huang started out on this project around 20 years ago, when a media outlet hired him to take similar photos of people with their material objects. Huang doesn't speak English, so his wife and fellow photographer Liu Yang translates my questions to him and explains his answers back.
“After a few years he decided to go deep into this project,” Yang said. “By adding his own opinions and vision.”
It's Huang's belief that the stuff we fill our homes with provides a unique insight into who we are and what we value.
“Because every family member, they buy things, they pick things according to their own experience or what they like,” explained Yang. “So they pick every item for this house so every item kind of reflects the family members’ spirit.”
Kirk and Barbie Perry are reflective looking over their items. Kirk shows off a treasure chest of comic books.
“I have every one of them, there’s probably about 11 to 12,000 of them over fifty some years,” he said. “So that’s kind of very intimidating, that’s something that’s been very personal. I haven’t really shared any of that with anybody.”
Barbie reviews the items lining a tall bookshelf. She says they've been downsizing and the items that remain have her reminiscing.
“The tall cabinet is full of memorabilia of my daughter and me when she was young,” she said. “And stuffed animals from our dog, Buddy, who passed a few years ago. Just special, those quiet moments in your life you tend to hold close and not everybody knows about.”
Choosing the right items to capture these special, quiet moments is a lengthy process. Yang tells me Huang starts conversations with subjects well ahead of the day of the shoot.
“After communication, he will have an idea what to display and what not. And ask for their opinions, if they’re comfortable,” she said. “For example, this photo, we started communication two months ago.”
But Yang and Huang didn't travel from China just for this photo shoot. They moved from China to Peoria a little over a year ago. Yang says they have relatives working at Caterpillar and fell in love with the city while visiting them. She describes Peoria as "quiet and beautiful."
“We feel the city is not very big, not very small, that’s what we like,” she said. “We don’t want, a city like Beijing is too crowded. We feel everything is very convenient.”
Yang says they've also been embraced by the local arts community.
“We were afraid of the arts events here,” she said. “But when we visit the Contemporary Arts Center and Peoria Art Guild, we feel there are a lot of arts going on here and many artists. So we decided to stay.”
Since moving here, work from the couple has been featured at both the Peoria Art Guild and the Contemporary Art Center. One of the exhibits at the Contemporary Art Center included Huang's series "Housed/Unhoused" putting pictures of people in homes with their possessions side by side with pictures of homeless people and their possessions.
"All kinds of conclusions can be made from this documentation" reads the exhibit description on the Contemporary Art Center's website. That's a philosophy that seems central to the series as a whole, there's a wide array of emotions and interpretations you can walk away with when you see a picture of a family or individual and their stuff.
“He wants the audience to first understand this family’s living conditions and their story,” said Yang. “And kind of feel, the audience themselves, in the photo and kind of relate it with themself from these belongings.”
The Perrys agree there's a lot you can take from Huang's photographs. Their whole involvement in the project began with an inquiry from William Butler at the Contemporary Art Center. For both of them, baring their soul through their stuff is a little intimidating.
“It’s very strange, I’m a very private person. I don’t like to share at all,” said Kirk. “So, this is like, totally, completely scary.”
“They described the project and it looked like something very uncomfortable,” added Barbie. “So we thought, like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do that.’”
As Kirk reviewed Huang's other work, he says he came away impressed. He particularly liked the range of living situations all presented in the same format.
“The concept, as I understand it, is that he’s trying to bring the world together by showing that everybody has many of the same commonalities, based on how they live, what they own,” Kirk said. “And then there are also the differences, but still at the core, everybody is the same.”
As Barbie points out, it helps that the end result takes her breath away.
“The unbelievable quality of his work is brilliant,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want to experience that?”
Kirk recalls a specific photograph from Huang's collection that caught his attention.
“I think it was a shepard and his family,” he says. “And everything that person owned, everything was in front. Now, they’re not going to be able to bring everything I own out and photograph it. But this person, and the house was probably as big as my shed in the backyard, but they were smiling, they were healthy.”
What's important here isn't the stuff, Kirk says. It's the broader picture, the lifestyle and the experience the stuff creates.
Huang has documented the life experiences of more than 100 people through their stuff. Yang tells me he's already done five of these photo shoots in the Greater Peoria Area and has plans to do more. Yang says Huang doesn't have a specific end goal in mind. One day, the photo series is over when it's time for it to be over.
But one certainty is a very special picture to cap the project off.
“He has done 140 photos for the past 20 years, so he definitely wants to go on,” said Yang. “And one day, when he feels that is the end of the series, he’s going to take his own family stuff.”
Huang's own picture, documenting his own family stuff and, possibly, documenting the life and experience he and his family built here in Peoria.
You can see more of Huang’s work here.
