Inanimate Objects, Full of Life

“With a still life,” says photographer Chris Mottalini, “you create something from nothing.” It’s the antithesis of his day job, which involves shooting distinguished homes and interiors—most painstakingly styled, long before he arrives—for glossy design magazines. What would happen if he combined the two approaches, turning the camera on his own abode?

In 2022, with his 5-year-old son, Nino, Mottalini started making still lifes of objects from their 1950s home in New York’s Hudson Valley, and from his in-law’s home in Thailand, where the family spends time each year. Images from the ongoing series, “Home Studies,” are on view for the first time in the exhibition “Nino + Dad (Home Studies)” at Available Items in Tivoli, New York (through Nov. 15).

Ahead of the show’s opening, from their house upstate, Chris and Nino talked about making the photos, and how the objects in our homes shape us.

CHRIS MOTTALINI: You claim to have no memory of the first photos we made.

NINO MOTTALINI: None.

CM: You just blacked out?

NM: [Silence]

CM: Well, I remember. We went down into the basement of our house to find things that represent the spirit of this place.

NM: The basement is scary. There’s a bunch of axes and chainsaws down there.

CM: That’s true. It has a dirt floor and rough rock walls. But we found some cool stuff: glass blocks and bottles, cinder blocks, an old light bulb. We arranged them, with fruit and flowers we found around here, on sets we painted. We took photos on the weekends.

Then I started working and traveling again, so we stopped. But we started up again during one of our annual visits to see your grandparents, in Thailand. Their house is different from ours, isn’t it?

NM: It’s also kind of creepy. [Sniffles]

CM: You need to blow your nose, dude.

Your grandparents have a lot of really great Chinese, Thai, and Czech antiques—objects from where they’ve lived around the world.

Remember how we looked around their house to find all that stuff? Like that six-hundred-year-old Chinese pot, the pink vases from their shrine to Buddha, or that ancient fish plate we balanced on top of a bunch of bananas? We stole all the leaves in that photo from their neighbors’ house.

NM: Oh, yeah. We went to the market to find cool stuff and got mangoes, dragon fruit, and giant coconuts. And durian, the stinky stuff.

CM: You’ve said that the photo with the durian in it is your favorite one. For all the photos, you told me when you liked something, or thought it looked bad, or felt needed something else. You helped me make these photos more than you realize.

NM: I did?

CM: What does looking at these photos make you feel? Like, what makes you love the durian photo? Does it remind you of your grandparents’ house?

NM: No. It’s boring there. They just have five TVs.

CM: You know they’re going to read this, right?

When we’re out in the main area of their house, where we always hear those big birds making noise through the windows, your grandmother is constantly there, making food in the kitchen. That’s the thing she does. I can smell the smells coming out of the kitchen right now.

There’s always tons of food talk at their house. All anybody thinks about is what they’re having for breakfast, what they’re going to get at the market for lunch, what they’re going to have for a snack, then for dinner. The whole day is based around that. That’s why it made sense to go heavy on food in these photos, since cooking and eating is such a huge part of our daily lives at home there.

Those are the kinds of things the photos make me think of.

NM: Well, our house is fun, and TV is not the only thing to do here. We play Legos and indoor soccer.

CM: It’s hard to describe what makes a house feel like a home. It’s an idea I’m really interested in. Our house, to me—I don’t know about you—feels like part of our family.

It’s more than just a house. And it’s the type of house I always envisioned having our family grow up in. Every inch of this place has memories. I never would’ve been, like, “I’m going to make a still life series about our house” unless we had a super deep connection to it. You kind of feel that way, too, don’t you?

NM: [Nods]

CM: You’ve told me you never want to live anywhere else, dude. That when mom and I are older, you’re going to kick us out so you can live here.

NM: [Smiles]

CM: It’s kind of an old-person way of thinking about home, isn’t it? Whereas when you’re a kid, you’re just, like, “Yeah, home is where all my stuff is.”

This house totally changed our lives. Your mom and I bought this place in 2015, and I was still assisting part time. We got this house at an online auction, [which made it more affordable], but it needed a lot of work. I’d worked in set design and prop styling, so I was handier than I had been when it came to carpentry and painting. I’d never owned and renovated a house before, but over the years, we chipped away at it.

When the pandemic happened, we had this place, so we never went back to the city, and we did more renovation projects. By then, you were here with us, and this place took on even more importance.

What do you think makes our photo project work?

NM: [Silence]

CM: To me, it works because it represents my idea of home. If our house was filled with a bunch of stuff that didn’t have any sentimental value for us, would you like living here?

NM: Nah.

CM: What are some things in this house that make it feel like home to you?

NM: [Silence]

CM: What’s important to you about your house or where we live? Or is it not that important to you?

NM: It’s important to me. I just don’t know how to explain it.

CM: I hear you. I feel like you’re a little stuck, dude. That’s okay.

I guarantee you and all of your friends will always have their memories and connections to their homes, especially when it’s the house they grew up in, or the house where their grandparents live.

Those are basically the two most important spaces in your life. They’re where you’ll form all of these feelings and memories until you go get some crappy apartment in the city when you’re nineteen, and start doing whatever you’re going to do.

What do you want the people who come to [the show’s opening] to leave with? What are you trying to tell them through these pictures?

NM: I want them to leave with ten prints each.

CM: You invited all your friends to the opening. You’re going to have more people there than I’m going to.

When you think about some of your best buds, when they come to see the photographs that you and I made together and printed, and are now framed and hung on a wall—they’re going to come up and ask you questions about the work. Do you want them to leave having a certain experience from our photos?

NM: They’re just my friends.

CM: Right. But why have we invited all these people to see what we’ve made?

Just say something, anything, dude.

NM: [Silence]

CM: I’ll say what I think. I think you invited them because subconsciously, you care.

Someday you’ll realize that you have all these memories that we’ve been talking about, about this house and your grandparents’ house. They’re not going to be around forever. And you’ll be able to remember spending time with them and their things and their home through these pictures.

We’re going to bring them prints when we go see them in December. They’re super honored and proud to have their things, these parts of their lives, in the photos that their grandson helped make. So of course we want to show that to our friends, because that’s what it’s all about, right?

NM: Yeah.

CM: Dude, this is the most important thing I’ve ever done when it comes to photography.

I’ve shot a lot of incredible places that have been really important to people. But this project means everything to me. This will probably be the best night of my life, just because it’s, like, we did this together. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without you.

You know, the first house I photographed was built [by Paul Rudolph] for a Dutch Holocaust survivor. It was his and his family’s sanctuary for obvious reasons. That was my first exposure to powerful residential architecture and interiors. It was in a state of disrepair, and in danger of being demolished, but it still was an incredibly beautiful experience for me. After having spent a day or two photographing that house, I knew this was what I wanted to do.

That put me on the path to photographing a specific type of residential space, which I want to be poetic and poignant. I’m trying to evoke some kind of emotion in people, to convey something beyond just capturing brilliant domestic spaces.

Often, these homes have a family that lives there and cares for it, and sometimes, they built it themselves. That kind of human interaction and intervention can turn an ordinary cottage into something totally incredible, that has so much meaning for many different people.

Anyway, dude, people express themselves in different ways. It’s important to really talk about the reasons we made this project together. But at a certain point, when people ask, “What’s home for you?”, there’s no need to go that deep into it.

Home is different for everybody, but more of than not, it’s kind of the same for everybody. It’s about what you do with it.


This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.