Interiors

In 1989, Catherine Wagner went house hunting. That process took her inside more than 200 homes and inspired the following photographs, triptychs that reveal, as writer Anne Lamott says in an essay on the works, “who we really are, what we love, how we live, what we yearn for--and the gulf between that and what is .”

Over the four years of this project, Wagner had just one rule: that she not know the people whose homes she photographed. “I asked people to ask their neighbors or their friends. I told them, ‘I’m interested in what you had for dinner, what’s in the refrigerator, anything you will allow me to see.’ People said yes; they also said, ‘There’s nothing to see.’ ”

For Wagner, however, every interior tells a story, and her choice of three images--the smallest number that form, in her words, “a sentence”--is merely an opening for the tales. There is, says Wagner, a “fine line between fiction and nonfiction in the photographs. Nothing in them was constructed for the camera. But each triptych is a narrative, constructed first by me and then from each viewer’s personal experience.” When you look at each set of three and fill in the story, Wagner says, “the piece is complete.”

Wagner, who is a professor of art at Mills College in Oakland, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts awards. Her book “American Classroom: The Photographs of Catherine Wagner” was published in 1987. Her book of these triptychs, “Home and Other Stories,” is being published in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the first exhibit of the photographs opens Thursday.