Yard Sale Photographs
Yard Sale Photographs, a new book of photography by Adam Bartos, revels in the everyday castoffs and outmoded bric-a-brac that lard the average American garage sale. With a cover that apes a second-hand book, replete with a $1 price sticker, Yard Sale Photographs' cock-eyed affection for the objects of our lives--tennis racquets, spare tires, a set of glasses, well-used toys--and the ritual selling of them, is manifest.
In lieu of a preface or artist's statement, however, Bartos kicks off his book with a short story by Raymond Carver called Why Don't You Dance?. This small, terse, ambivalent tale is about a nameless young couple who come to visit a man's yard sale, and end up drinking and dancing with him.
In the masterful fashion one comes to expect from Carver, both the promise and the desperation one feels rooting through another's junk is made clear. The story casts a pall over Bartos' more sympathetic work, resulting in an artifact that is at once, not unlike a yard sale itself, a celebration and a funeral.
Click on the link in the upper right corner to view a slideshow of select photographs from the book.
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Aaron, this book looks so rad. Yard sales are fascinating... such an intimate glimpse into people's lives, laid out on the sidewalk for all to see. And a Carver story to boot! A real find. I want to check it out.
At The Apartment on 18th and Valencia in San Francisco, they used to have piles of photographs, mostly little ones, 50s-style 3" by 2", just sitting in boxes. You could flip through, identify old friends. See a house evolve. Then skip to a deserted landscape of unknown provenance. Last time I went, though, they'd sorted the photos. "Blacks" were one category, bungalows another. The serendipity, the missed/imagined connections were gone. It was just like the real world, everything and everyone in its place. That's what I worry about with this book. In selecting the photos, they gain more significance than they could have ever had at a garage sale.They get context and they lose their strangeness. You want to imagine the world they came from, not know it. But I don't know. Does it work? Does it feel like flipping through the errata of a bygone time?
Alexis, so interesting that you bring up The Apartment! I just went there for the first time a few weeks ago and could very easily still be happily standing in the corner, thumbing through all the black and whites. The photos were all sorted by category but I didn't feel like that diminished their intrigue at all, actually. Within the different boxes-- houses, or cars, or holidays, etc.-- there was such, such, such a range; knowing you're going to be seeing a series of pics from Hanukkah celebrations past does not by any means indicate the heartwarming/wrenching scenes, expressions, and captured moments. So much of the beauty of those old images came from the fact that they only had one chance to take the shot, and there was a kind of innocence in that, something lost with the thousands of digitals today. All that being said, I leafed through the book at Aaron's desk and it wasn't quite as magical as I had hoped. Might be happier heading over to The Apartment again for that fleeting glimpse into others' lives through found photography.
I have a GREAT tip...www.salehop.com, is a fantastic website for finding yard sales in your area. It will list all the websites in your area, list featured items and map a route to each of them. Saving us time and money! It doesn't get better than that.
Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.
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