New York Living Rooms

Come closer, dear reader, and let me take you to New York—circa late ’90s—by way of Dominique Nabokov’s lens. New York Living Rooms, the very first chapter in her holy trinity of interior “portraits,” has been handsomely re-issued more than twenty years after its 1998 debut.

Originally commissioned by The New Yorker in 1995, the book slips us into the private rooms of some of the city’s great cultural characters: Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Didion—the sort of guest list that would make any dinner party blush. Dominique arrives with her Polaroid, alters nothing, adds nothing, and simply lets each room reveal its own temperament.

Some interiors are lavish, some beautifully spare, but all are offered with the same quiet, unvarnished honesty. Long out of print, this edition revives a vivid slice of New York history, complete with the original introduction by poet James Fenton. And, of course, it sets the scene for the Paris and Berlin volumes that would follow—a grand tour of three cities, told through the intimate language of their living rooms.