Can the portrait of a person emerge from the sum of the possessions they surrounds themselves with?
In January 1973, Boltanski wrote a letter to 62 museum institutions with the proposal to present the entirety of the objects owned by a deceased citizen in display cases in a room of the museum.
The director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford at the time, Peter Ibsen, accepted the proposal and carried out the painstaking photographic documentation of the possessions of a young Oxford resident, which is presented in its entirety in this publication together with Boltanski’s letter to the museums and the replies received.
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