When Corinne Botz was a preteenager in Glen Rock, N.J., she and her two sisters appeared on a segment of “Good Morning America” as the “bad example,” she said recently, in a story about children’s messy bedrooms. (Asked by the television reporter why she didn’t clean her room, she recalled her 11-year-old self replying airily, “I don’t have time!”)

Since then, Botz, now a solemn 33-year-old artist, has found herself ineluctably drawn to the power of stuff and the human fascination with it, an interest she has explored in a body of photographic work that reads like a DSM of contemporary American life and the dark side of domesticity.

For her MFA thesis project at Bard in 2006, she chronicled the homes and possessions of agoraphobics, in luminous photographs that depict, for example, the night table of a Pennsylvania woman who hadn’t left her house in years and who experienced anxiety if any of the objects sitting beside her bed were moved. In Germany, on an artist’s residency a few years ago, Botz met a woman who claimed to be in love with the Berlin train station, and she made an oddly affecting video about that strange (and unrequited) passion for a public building, in which the woman frets that she has no privacy with her beloved.

Then there is “The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” Botz’s best-known work, a book of photographs of dollhouse dioramas of true crime scenes put together in the 1940s by Frances Glessner Lee, an heiress turned amateur criminologist. The meticulously built miniatures of mayhem — blood stains on a tiny pillow! — were created as tutorials in crime detection and now live in the Maryland State medical examiner’s office in Baltimore, where Botz spent six years photographing them, amassing 500 images. (Obsession, as The Village Voice pointed out in a review when “The Nutshell Studies” was published in 2004, can be contagious.) Seen through Botz’s lens, the mini-crime scenes are as lush and moody as a Brian De Palma film, yet homey, too. The book did well for Botz’s publisher, the Monacelli Press, selling out its first print run.

Last month, the Monacelli Press published her second book, “Haunted Houses,” photographs of more than 80 such houses around the country — an appropriate topic for someone who appears to have a lifelong appetite for what the architecture critic Anthony Vidler would call “warped spaces.”

Yet Botz’s insight into them might still surprise you. Ghosts, she notes, are the ultimate agoraphobics.

“What’s really interesting to me is people who have an extreme perception of space, or an extreme attachment to a space,” she said. Ghosts, she added, just don’t know how to let go.

Botz, however, is pretty good at it. A few weeks ago, in her small Williamsburg, Brooklyn, apartment, a ground-floor railroad flat that she shares with her boyfriend, Nate Green, a sculptor, she displayed her disciplined approach to decorating: Let in as little as possible.

To be sure, there was a taxidermy squirrel on the chimney ledge, and a vintage dollhouse. Over the kitchen table hung some Halloween accouterments, including a paper accordion of cutout bats and a spider web, neither of which was a seasonal item, Botz said. “They’re always there.”

She held up a fake rock, bought in a giddy moment at a recent yard sale. “We try so hard not to bring stuff in,” she said weakly.

But everyone collects something, she added.

These days, Botz is trying to collect other people’s things.

After her “Good Morning America” debut, Botz began embellishing her room with old cameras, bottles and license plates, among other items. “At some point, I realized it would get out of hand, and I thought I would just collect with photos instead,” she said.

This exchange — of the image for the object — circles in and out of her work.

In her agoraphobia photos, there are no people, just spaces: a plastic hamster environment (sans hamster) filled with tchotchkes; a swag of curtain bedecked with bows. Botz was curious about the things that made their owners feel safe, and wanted to explore the environments they spent so much time in.

But she also made portraits of her subjects, as a way of getting to know them and as something she could leave them in exchange: her prints for their hospitality.

“I felt like they were doing so much in opening their homes to me, I had to give something back,” she said.

For agoraphobics, many of whom are women, it’s often the gaze of others that is so troubling; the portrait process was agonizing, they said, but also therapeutic. (A feminist will tell you that an agoraphobic is internalizing social ills, meaning her terror contains both the idea of the home as a prison and the notion that public space is inhospitable to women.) One of Botz’s subjects, an ebullient-sounding artist and writer named Robyn Bellospirito, used her own photographs as a way to soothe her fears when she had to leave the house, taking hundreds of pictures along her route.

It’s not an uncommon strategy, as Botz has learned in her most recent project, for treating a different sort of modern malady.

Professional organizers frequently urge clients to photograph objects they have trouble letting go of, as an assist to “dispossession,” said Catherine Roster, research director for the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization. (“Chronic disorganization” being the phrase used to describe the continuum from those mildly addled by clutter to full-blown hoarders.) Roster is collaborating on Botz’s new investigation, which examines “the accumulation of objects.”

As usual, Botz is thinking about humans and their compulsions toward their spaces and their stuff. A central tension of American life — the desire to acquire and the subsequent inability to dispossess — is the sore spot she would like to probe.

Roster, surely one of the few Ph.D.’s in marketing interested in the way people get rid of stuff, is enthusiastic. “This stage is much richer than we’d ever thought,” she said the other day. “Acquisition, consumption, meaning — it all gets tangled in this last stage.”

She continued: “Getting rid of a possession means abdicating all the pleasures and rights of that possession. And that freaks people out. It goes like this: ‘I got this from Aunt Maria; I can’t get rid of it. I spent a lot of money on this; I can’t get rid of it. I wore this a year ago, I might wear it again; I can’t get rid of it. If I get rid of it, I’ve lost all these opportunities.’ That’s a kind of death.”

And you wonder why it’s so hard to clean out your closet.

Indirectly inspired by an upstairs neighbor who is a personal organizer and is constantly de-accessioning — on a shelf in a common hall last week was a neat row of spice bottles, her current giveaway — Botz contacted Roster’s organization to ask its members’ clients to send her objects, along with stories about why the objects mattered to them. In return, she promised to send them photographs of the items.

Slowly, like byproducts of a late night on eBay, the objects began to arrive: a wedding dress, a mandolin, an old sherry bottle. These are just a few of the objects that have leaked into Botz’s tiny space, threatening to overtake the few possessions she and Green have allowed themselves.

“Like every New Yorker, I’m petrified of bedbugs,” she said. “Luckily, everything came from out of state.” (Although she did find a dead beetle in the wrapping of a doll sent by a friend.)

Botz had arrayed the incoming items on a small, low table in her bedroom. There was a red folding umbrella, a notepad from a pharmaceutical company, an ancient portable television, a yellow dress with puffy, capped sleeves.

One itches to throw them out. But their stories are heartbreaking: A professor of medicine wrote about how depression had made it impossible to keep the job she loved, and the pharmaceutical pad she had sent — she had saved four boxes of them, she wrote — was a relic of that long-ago life. An umbrella had been owned by a young woman hit by a car on a rainy day; the umbrella broke, but the woman survived, and she saved it, as she wrote in her note, as a kind of memento mori.

Botz hasn’t settled on a photographic treatment of the objects yet, she said. Maybe she’ll rent a storage unit, set it up with all the stuff, so that it looks like a storefront, and photograph the scene.

“But then I’d need a lot more objects,” she said. “And I don’t know where I’d put them.”

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