Justin Kimball: Pieces of String

For four years Justin Kimball (born 1961) accompanied his brother Doug, an auctioneer, into the houses of the recently deceased or dispersed. While Doug cleared these spaces of items for potential resale, Justin sought within them the evidence of an individual’s life. Photographing “the smallest objects (a note, a box of hair pins, a stain on a pillow),” he reimagines their existence and relationship to their absent owners. “I use the camera's descriptive power and the photographic illusion of truth to create the narrative and inspire feelings about its subject,” he writes of these images. “The resulting photographs are my perception of what happened in those spaces: who lived there? What was hidden and what was seen?” Kimball's color photographs explore the minutiae of everyday life and contemplate our brief and humble legacies before they are cleaned up and cast to the wind. Beautifully produced, Pieces of String comes as a bound paperback held by a thick rubber band inside a wrap-around, board cover that features a tipped-on color image and printed staining effects that evoke the photographs' textures of wear and tear.