New photos from the steeply-priced battlefront of San Franciscan thrift shops. There's one store in particular that I think does an especially shameful lack of haggeling over prices-- a major component of the experience of buying things used. Awesome second-hand purchases landmark my memories from the past few years-- the time I bought 90 ties for 15 bucks in Boston, the time I found all the parts of a 100 year old wooden bed frame for 20 bucks in Portland, a seemingly infinite amount of old lady slips at 15 cents a pop in Ludlow, VT.
But for me, acquiring things goes beyond the consumerism and I'm always excited about expanding my collections with deviance or coincidence (read: shoplifting and free piles). In Portland I started telling my friends I was liberating objects (as opposed to stealing), but I realized that this was problematic validation because I was actually just taking them from one dark unloved existence and entering them into the annonymity of another. This was a big part of why I thought a blog might help the polemics of owning a photo collection-- that photos are for seeing, and that no one was seeing mine.
No comments:
Post a Comment