Yards Sales by Greg Ruffing
My ongoing series Yard Sales evolved out of a 3-day assignment for TIME Magazine in August 2008 to photograph the self-proclaimed “World’s Longest Yard Sale”, a 650-mile route of sales in small towns from Alabama to Ohio.
At first I was naturally drawn to the variety of quirky, odd, and downright bizarre objects to be found there. Yard sales are a curious microcosm of the economy, almost a grassroots marketplace where the process of buying and selling items is reduced to a very simple form, and where price-negotiating and even bartering are quite common.
Yet there was an early realization as well of a deeper theme: that the string of sales was a profound illustration of a certain aspect of American-style consumerism gone rampant. What explains this constant compulsion to buy and shop and accumulate these material possessions? And then what happens to those possessions when they are no longer of any value in terms of usefulness, entertainment, etc.?
It got me very interested in the life cycle of material objects and where that fits into the overall notion of consumerism. The yard sale provides a vehicle for replenishing that life cycle of the material objects: “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, as the saying goes. What is rendered useless by one person can then be injected with fresh meaning by a new owner. And in a certain way, this potential for repurposing stands as a great alternative to what would otherwise be the wasteful discarding of disposable items.
It was by way of all those thoughts that I chose to continue photographing yard sales later that summer and fall of 2008 -- and the series took a quick acceleration on the path of those themes at the end of 2008 as the American economy dipped into what would later be termed the Great Recession.
Suddenly there was financial hardship for many Americans, and this time it would be an economic bubble-burst that we likely couldn’t shop our way out of. Analysts abounded questioning the decades-long American fascination with consumerism and its emphasis as a way to propel the economy. Navel-gazers wondered aloud if we had actually shopped ourselves INTO this recession by living beyond our means through cheap credit. Many families suffered through foreclosures and job losses, forcing the nation to perhaps consider a more austere lifestyle.
It was in this environment that I felt compelled to continue work on the Yard Sales series, and to approach the work specifically from the point of using these photographs to ask questions about and start conversations examining consumerism and its place in society.
Since then, I have explored and documented yard sales throughout the United States (even returning once to the Longest Yard Sale route, in 2009). With this refined vision I’ve also made a point to photograph sales in very specific places such as military housing at Ft. Leavenworth Army base in Kansas, and stoop sales among the urban row houses and brownstones in New York City.
Moreover, in areas of southwest Florida that have had some of the highest home foreclosure rates in the U.S., yard sales have taken on a deeper and sadder context, as many people I met and photographed there had decided to sell off possessions because they needed money to scrape by. Others were hosting a yard sale because they had recently foreclosed on their home and were forced to move in with family out of state. And further down the line, I even met a few Floridians who admitted they were selling items that had been scavenged from a nearby foreclosure days before, as levels of desperation in the region had created an underground network of scrappers who would steal material possessions left behind in foreclosed homes and shuffle them into a mix of internet sales or yard sales.
Greg Ruffing is a Cleveland, OH based artist.
To view more of Greg's work, please visit his website.
