The Burning House is a blog turned into a book. The premise of the blog was that people would submit a photo and an explainer list of the things they'd want to take if their house were on fire. Huntington, the blog's creator, would curate and post these entries, and the book is a further distillation.
Most of the results are surprisingly similar, though the clever staging of the photos lends the project even more visual interest than you might expect. When thinking of their most treasured possessions, most people seem to think of a mix of the prosaic (wallet, keys, passport); the sentimental (photos, journals, letters, childhood toys); the financially valuable (phones, laptops, cameras); and the kinds of things that serve as symbols for one's self-image (favorite clothes, books, movies, music). The variations within those constraints are fascinating.
A few people took the prompt more literally than most. They emphasized survival gear, or limited themselves to just one or two items. Their accompanying essays often sounded scolding, but arguably it was them, not all the others, who'd missed the true point of the task. A few people actually had survived house fires and submitted photos of what they'd actually saved.
Beyond merely the similar ways people respond to the same prompt, the entries had other things in common. Almost everyone had a film camera to save, and most had several. Nearly all the phones and laptops were from Apple; most of the journals were Moleskine. People with pets, or occasionally children, mentioned saving those too, and usually included them in the photo.
The overall effect is like touring a museum. Each page is an exhibit of the most important things in someone's life, arranged to try to tell a kind of story of their life, their loves, their values ... as well as their coolness, their status, etc.
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