Photo Series Reveals What It's Like To Grow Up In A Hoarder's House

Hoarding disorder makes it hard, if not impossible, for hoarders to throw anything away, and their lives quickly become one big, cluttered mess.

Hoarders are often abandoned by their families, because people can no longer bear to live in a home piled floor to ceiling with garbage, and kids whose parents are hoarders experience an entirely different kind of homelife.

Photographer Geoff Johnson and his sister grew up in a hoarder's house, so he decided to share their unique childhood experiences with the uncluttered world through a series of photographs entitled "Behind The Door".

The images are voyeuristic, unsettling and yet insightful, giving us a rare glimpse of how a child might cope with life among the rubbish piles.

-Via Dangerous Minds


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i lived next door to a man who would complain loudly and rudely if we didn't mow the tiny patch of grass in our wooded yard weekly. he said we were bringing the value of his property down. one day i was called over by his sons to help them move a huge old tv out of his house. the entire house was filled literally to the freaking ceiling with bursting garbage bags and filth. there were narrow paths to make your way across the room, maybe a foot and a half wide. it smelled like a dumpster filled with corpses and poop. after having me inside his house, he never complained about our yard and his property value again.
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I am friends with a couple with a similar issue. They have never cleaned their home. I am even better friends with their daughter. She has offered to hire a cleaning service, but they think their home is just fine. It is not. For example, they have never vacuumed their carpet in 20 years.

We have come to the conclusion that it is pathological and decline dinner invitations.
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They're staged photos that serve as recreations of what the living conditions were like for Geoff and his sister growing up in a hoarder's home.

They're essentially "art installations" if you want to think of them that way, but really the main point of the series (as I see it anyway) is to illustrate how a child learns to work around the massive mess when they live with a hoarder.

Since hoarders tend to be solitary and reclusive individuals it would be really hard to set up a photo shoot inside a hoarder's home, although I'm pretty sure the actual trash inside a hoarder's home would be a lot more disgusting than the piles presented in these photos.
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I'm confused.

"This work is a personal reflection from Geoff and his sister's life growing up. Geoff recreated images displaying how stuff not only consumed his childhood home, but deteriorated conditions for daily living, ultimately shaping who he would become."

Does that mean these are not photos of children living in a hoarder's home, but rather just an "art installation" ?
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