What aspects of living are meant to be done in a living room, exactly? Not eating, which takes place, at least theoretically, in the dining room or in the kitchen; not sleeping or having sex, which takes place in the bedroom. (And, unless you live in an old East Village tenement, I won’t even mention bathing.) What the living room is for, ostensibly, is gathering. It’s the most public-facing of a home’s spaces, and, as such, it bears a particular burden: that of showcasing to others who the occupants are. The quilt you drape on your couch, the paintings you hang on your walls, the tchotchkes you select for your mantel—all are about as important to your adult self-conception as heavy eyeliner and chunky boots are to an emo teen’s, which is to say, very. The signifiers might change, but the impulse remains the same.

That this idea holds most true, perhaps, for the living rooms of New Yorkers shouldn’t surprise us: this is a city made for outsized characters. In 1995, The New Yorker commissioned the photographer Dominique Nabokov to capture such spaces, free of the homes’ residents. It was interior photography as portraiture. To celebrate the magazine’s centenary, the photographer Gillian Laub was asked to revisit a similar brief, but this time she included the inhabitants. We see the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, coquettishly cross-legged beneath a gargantuan image of her own face; and the political operative Huma Abedin and her fiancé, the investor and philanthropist Alex Soros, in a room whose spectacular city views serve as its adornment. In Laub’s pictures, we encounter the city’s powerful and formidable, amid the precious objects that define them. But even the more modest parlors teem with meaning. The “S.N.L.” cast member Sarah Sherman stretches out on her couch, surrounded by bits and bobs as colorful and chaotic as her harlequin-style getup: a doll made in her likeness, a disembodied hand, a framed poster of Garbage Pail Kids cards, a Pee-wee Herman candle. It all tells a story, as any living room—and any photograph—should do.