Home Is Where the Couch Is: Photos by Natcha Wongchanglaw

While the accommodations alteration greatly from sofa to couch, 1 happening is ever certain: determination typically isn’t a photograph of wherever you’ll beryllium sleeping. Instead, the descriptions written by hosts usually springiness a consciousness of what to expect—whether it’s a backstage room, a couch, oregon sometimes adjacent sharing a furniture with the host. This deficiency of certainty makes each sofa enactment consciousness similar its ain unsocial experience, shaped by the big and the abstraction they offer.

Each photograph successful the bid showcases a antithetic host—someone from a far-off state with a unsocial story, job, and lifestyle. The scope is striking: a free-spirited pistillate successful Mexico who works astatine Booking.com and parties each night, a authorities speechwriter from Canada, and a nudist successful Brooklyn. Natcha’s lens captures not conscionable the hosts but the subtle dynamics that play retired erstwhile surviving nether idiosyncratic else’s roof—sometimes cozy, sometimes awkward, but ever profoundly personal.

The task began during Natcha’s clip successful creation schoolhouse successful New York, wherever she turned to Couchsurfing arsenic a mode to easiness the loneliness of starting caller successful a caller city. For her, it was much than conscionable a mode to find a furniture for the night—it was an accidental to connect, learn, and grow. The bid is simply a representation of these connections—some fleeting, others enduring—and a reflection connected how, successful the end, we are each conscionable travelers looking for a spot to telephone home.