Over time we're often fooled into thinking that our private spaces effectively hold our secrets. Our living rooms, our refrigerators and our bookshelves are like repositories for the details of our lives that were meant only for ourselves, and maybe for the occasional carefully vetted visitor.

For the most part our society respects this idea of privacy, but like curious thieves in the night, some artists prefer to tell stories by entering the spaces we call home and illuminating the objects we keep.

Photographer Todd Selby, known for his project The Selby [is in your place], and 20x200 artists Jane Mount and Mark Menjivar, are among this group of personality revealing artists. If given permission, they will zoom in on the things you keep stashed away and use their works to reveal the precise, finite details of our lives.

In some ways this approach leaves glaring gaps in the stories of who we are, but for the most part it also reveals the things we often omit from introductions and autobiographical portrayals of ourselves. Selby attacks this intimate approach in his ongoing project by photographing the famous—of the fashion, art and cultural worlds—in their homes. Though their clothes and their expressions always reveal a bit about them, it's his signature shots of their peculiar knickknacks, artwork, and collectibles from around the world that are truly revelatory—it's what they have that nobody else does.

Jamie Isaia - photographer; and Anthony Malat - clothing designer in their Brooklyn home by Todd Selby

Mark Menjivar takes a slightly different approach to his work, omitting the subject entirely and instead focusing only on an open picture of their fridge. As you can imagine, participants who have let him photograph their fridges has liked the experience to "posing naked" or as Claire O'Neill of NPR's Picture Show called it last week, a "foodie's Freudian analysis."

Midwife/Middle School Science Teacher | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household (including dog) | First week after deciding to eat locally grown vegetables. by Mark Menjivar

The ever curious Jane Mount takes a similar approach without a camera. Like someone who might draw your most played list on iTunes, she tells the stories of our lives through the titles we keep on our bookshelves.

The image below reveals swissmiss' (aka Tina Roth Eisenberg's) favorite children's books. (Hint!: In the next few hours we'll be releasing a new edition from Jane and we can hardly wait for you to see it. Stay tuned to see whose story she will tell next.)

Ideal Bookshelf 5 by Jane Mount

In each of these variations of portraiture, it's the particular combination of objects—whether it organic milk and blue cheese, your copy of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer next to Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs & Ham or your home's special collection of rare African figurines—that makes them both yours and meaningful. So, seeing those characterized in gouache, pen, ink or as a photograph, memorializes and further solidifies that they are more than transient things in your life.