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The Estate Sale

04.27.24 Estate Sale

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I’ve got an idea for a new project. Nothing real concrete, more of a feeling. I need old family photographs and film strips that one might find at an estate sale. After a brief search I found an estate sale happening not far from where I live. I arrived on a rainy Saturday as they opened the house. Any thoughts of a leisurely morning were quickly banished as the barred talons of hungry deal seekers descended. “Chill out Gail, that $40 crock pot isn’t going to define your legacy.” At first alarmed by the feeding frenzy, I eventually got comfortable with the mood of the morning and went with it. They didn’t have what I was looking for but I was able to observe this weird intersection of death, nostalgia and capitalism. 


So many of the items were familiar to me. Either through the objects that I directly interacted with or those items I remember my parents and grandparents owning. This led to the sobering realization that the former owners of all this stuff were likely not much older than my parents are today. These artifacts of the people who passed interacting with my own memories creates a strange dynamic that I find hard to define.


I’ll keep a running record here of the people and ephemera I find as I continue to look for old family media to use for this early idea of a project,


*Photographs shot on Fujix100s and processed with VSCO

Joe Hubers