Can a house be the subject rather than a person?

Yes. For a move, a downsizing or a housewarming, the place somebody is leaving usually matters more than the one they are arriving at.

The condition is that you need photographs from while it was still lived in.

The house being left, not the one being bought

Housewarming gifts conventionally point forward — something for the new place. That is a reasonable instinct and it misses what is actually happening, which is that somebody is leaving a house they were in for forty-one years.

The new flat will accumulate its own meaning without help. The house that has just been sold will not, and after completion there is no way back in to photograph it.

Pictures taken to sell it do not work

This is the practical trap. By the time a move is underway, the most recent photographs of a house are the estate agent's — and those have been staged specifically to remove everything that made it somebody's.

Cleared surfaces. Furniture moved. The clutter that constituted forty years of occupancy taken out precisely so a stranger can imagine themselves there.

A piece built from those is about a property. What you want is older and worse: the kitchen with things on the counter, the table with the burn mark, the back door propped open.

Look for the accidental photographs

Nobody photographs their own house deliberately. The usable images are almost always incidental — a birthday where the room is the background, a Christmas morning, a dog on a sofa that happens to show the whole living room.

Ask relatives for pictures taken in the house rather than of it. That phrasing surfaces material the other one does not.

Which room

Almost never the best one. The formal sitting room, the one kept tidy for visitors, is the room least used and least missed.

What people name when asked is the kitchen, a particular chair, the view from one window, the back step. Those are the rooms a house was actually lived in, and they are the ones with the marks on them.

If you are unsure, ask the person leaving which room they will think about. They answer immediately, and it is rarely the one an estate agent photographed first.

Timing

Before completion if you can, because access ends. If it has already gone, the photographs that exist are the photographs that exist, and there are usually more than people expect once several people look.

Can a photograph of an empty room be a memorial covers the case where nobody is in the frame at all. Heirloom is the size interiors usually want.