Two rooms. One forgotten, one arranged.
One speaks through dust, disorder, and labor left unfinished.
The other whispers through polish, balance, and restraint.
In Abandoned / Occupied , two interiors are placed in dialogue. The first, a sepia-toned storeroom, reveals the raw imprint of use, a space where objects outlive their purpose. The second, captured in vivid color, presents a carefully composed domestic scene: untouched, unwrinkled, almost theatrical in its stillness.
The contrast is visual and symbolic. One is a relic of labor. The other, a symbol of presentation.
What does it mean to inhabit a space? And when does a room become more image than interior?
This diptych asks not what we own, but what our rooms say when we’re no longer in them.
This work began with two separate photographs taken months apart, in two unrelated spaces. What bound them together was not what they showed, but what they revealed and concealed.
The first image, rendered in sepia, carries the weight of a space abandoned to its function: clutter, dust, and the quiet after-use. It is unsanitized, but deeply human. The second, vibrant and curated, is a room not of work, but of appearance, meant to be seen, not disturbed.
By preserving the color in one and draining it from the other, I emphasize the duality of presence: not just who lives where, but how we perform or preserve that living.
One image records the entropy of time. The other, the precision of control.
This diptych is not about opposites, but about layers, how rooms remember us, and how we try to forget what they know.
BASSEM H. BOUSTANY Photography 
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