Yard Sale Photographs – Adam Bartos

The Raymond Carver short story ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ starts off the collection of photographs in this incredibly vibrant book, Yard Sale Photographs, by Adam Bartos. This is a magnetizing set of images taken from different yard sales. It seems cosmically perfect that Raymond Carver has a story about a man putting his bedroom set out on his front lawn, not hoping to sell it, but attracting interest just the same, Adam Bartos must like Carver. They say when you’re trying to sell your home you should put a pot of boiling water on the stove, fill it with chopped apples and let it simmer the night before. The apple fragrance will remind prospective buyers of comfort and warmth, making it easier to wrap their minds around such a large purchase. This book reminds me of the forgotten art of selling your belongings to the strangers of this world who have followed a sign that led them to your home.

I just finished a John Cheever story called The Swimmer, where a man has been locked out of his own home and is going to swim around the county, from one neighbor’s pool to the next. Cheever, Carver and Updike all wrote about suburbia with great effect, but I can’t remember a series of photographs as effective as these, which document what suburban Americans put out on their front lawns for sale. Yard Sale Photographs is a wonderful inspection of these little “sales” which give you a glimpse into the people selling and offer insights into the mind of bargain hunter.

The Kodak view-finders mixed in with the Day-Glo handbags of years gone by, which to the lazy buyer might seem like a mess. It’s intriguing to see the overhead shot of the hardback books without dust jackets neatly lined up alongside one another, and a book in Japanese fitting itself into the corner, the language in symbols. Some of these objects are shot in an airless and soul deadening fashion, the easel and office chair that may have been stored in the garage which are carefully lined up on the grass behind a spare tire that looks like it just fell off the car is propped against a bean that hangs from the top of the picture frame. When you look at this image closely you see not only the red tray at the bottom of the easel, but the child’s highchair tucked next to it, the safety strap hanging beneath and running into the red tray of the easel. As if the two are connected, or sold together. It’s this kind of eye for simple detail which helps these photographs breath.

The endless amount of beauty in these pictures is natural and organic. Like the series of dishes set along the weeds of a side yard, pots, pans, cake platters, stacked carelessly, and taking up the foreground under a half baked pine tree that is growing sideways and would be throwing a shadow if the sun were lower in the sky. A forgotten player in this picture is a wheel barrel in the far background that is not for sale but filled with what looks to be weeds that were probably pulled by the homeowner from an unseen garden. It’s the beaten down brown grass around these dishes that makes me think this yard sale is a weekly occurrence, and these former staples of the kitchen have been permanently relocated to the front lawn, for anyone to buy, seven days a week.

I can’t do these pictures justice; my descriptions just scratch the surface. The images in this book are so striking, filled with such simplicity and geometric elegance. They cover a wide range of yard sale items which to the casual eye would be mundane at best, but in this book are brought to life and given everlasting urgent brilliance.