FINDERS KEEPERS: A PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY PROJECT

Finders Keepers: A photographic documentary project on yard sales

For my semester long project I want to document yard sales and the people who have them. I have been going to yard sales since I was a very small child. My great grandmother used to go to yard sales every weekend. She passed down this to my grandmother and my mother. The four of us would go every weekend when we all lived in Central California. When my immediate family moved to Colorado, my mom and I continued the tradition and I found that people who had garage sales were very interesting and usually friendly.
In an article written in 2006 by Bill Virgin, yard sales were estimated to earn Americans close to 2 billion dollars a year in the averaged 9 million garage sales a year. People have yard sales for different reasons, some for getting rid of clutter, some to make some extra needed cash and some just to get rid of leftover things they no longer need.
I plan to go to yard sales every weekend finding them in the newspaper or by following signs. I want to spend 20-30 minutes documenting each sale, the people running it and also the people shopping at it. If time and cooperation allows I want to find some people who shop frequently at yard sales and photograph them and their homes. I want to talk to the person having the garage sale about the reasons they are having the sale and if it has anything to do with the current economy. I will keep a blog of my project progress and also make inkjet prints. On my blog I plan on including a photo or text of the ad posted, either from the paper or the online ad.