Name: Fernanda Ávila
Age: 21
Location: Santiago, Chile
Occupation: Engineering student
What would you take with you if your house caught fire? That's the burning question Foster Huntington came up with to filter potential dates, a provocative query that eventually turned into a wildly successful blog and book.
"If they said 'a Chanel purse' I would have been like, 'Screw that,'" says Huntington, 24, in an interview with Wired.
Within days of coming up with the concept at a dinner party, he had started The Burning House blog and posted photos of his and a couple friends' prized possessions. The blog went semi-viral over the next two weeks, with readers from around the world submitting photos of their favorite things.
"It just kind of snowballed," he says.
At the time, Huntington was living in New York City and working as a concept designer for Ralph Lauren, a job he initially liked but had quickly become disenchanted with.
"I was having to sit through these meetings where grown men were screaming at each other about small differences in cashmere sweater colors and I was like, 'There is no fucking way I can do this for the rest of my life,'" he says.
Luckily, the blog became so successful that he was able to line up a publisher for the Burning House book and received enough cash from the advance to leave the city. He bought a four-wheel-drive Volkswagen van and has traveled more than 45,000 miles around the country over the past 13 months, taking photos and expanding his digital footprint.
"It's been wild," he says.
Interestingly, The Burning House wasn't the first time Huntington had used a blog to break out of a stale situation.
Back in 2008, he was a struggling, dyslexic college student facing an economy that was circling the toilet bowl. He didn't particularly like what he was studying and knew his job prospects were dim.
He bought a DSLR on a whim and started making photos that he posted on his first blog, A Restless Transplant. The photos didn't have a clear theme, but Huntington quickly developed a unique kind of Americana/retro aesthetic, often focusing on landscapes, cars, clothes or other objects he liked.
"Up until that point everything had always been this huge battle for me," he says. "I was a mediocre student at best but when I started taking photos and doing visual stuff, everything started clicking."
At the time, Huntington was living in Waterville, Maine, and somehow a Ralph Lauren employee who grew up in the area happened upon his blog. That employee liked Huntington's eye and his style choices enough to offer him the internship that eventually led to his job.
It was the first step in what Huntington now refers to as the "Field of Dreams, build it and they will come" kind of social-media-infused life he would build on with The Burning House.
"I quickly realized that I had to make my own opportunities," he says.
In addition to surfing a lot, Huntington has been trying to diversify the coverage on The Burning House during his time on the road. When he first started the blog, it was particularly popular with the younger urban crowd. Well-known hipster items, like old toy cameras and antique clothing, became recurring themes.
Huntington says the occasional surprise also found its way into the photos, including a pet parrot, a slice of pizza and a photo of a girl standing over her stillborn sister in the hospital.
"I was like, 'Holy shit, that is incredibly personal and emotional,'" he says.
Huntington says that since leaving New York he's tried to photograph the objects of people who lead a more normal and less "hip" lifestyle.
"I didn't want people who drive a Subaru or an Audi and have a Moleskine to dominate the site," he says. "I wanted to broaden the perspective."
Out on the road he's started a third blog called Van Life, which features his and other photographers' photos of vans that serve as mobile homes. He also started using the #vanlife Instagram hashtag, which has helped him reach more than 225,000 followers on the photo-sharing site.
"I'm totally a product of social media," says Huntington, who estimates that he communicates with about half a million people each day online.
His creativity has continued to pay off: In addition to the book deal, he's hooked a couple of corporate clients who've paid him enough to keep his adventure alive. He just came back from a two-week surf trip to northern Russia (sponsored by Patagonia), where he was in charge of documenting the excitement on Tumblr and Instagram; he's about to head out on another Patagonia-backed adventure with a bunch of surfers as they bicycle and surf their way through Big Sur in Northern California.
At the moment, Huntington says he has no plans to rejoin the static world anytime soon.
"After seeing what kind of online and mobile opportunities are out there, I figure that I'll never really have a desk job again," he says. "Now more than ever, people can live free lives but still be connected."
All photos: Courtesy Foster Huntington
Sarah Mitroff 20 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/kj3YBxwRBoY/
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