Years Later by Nick Schietromo

Issue 108

Each trip to a flea market, yard sale, or thrift shop is a unique find. While rummaging through shoeboxes and hand woven baskets, I search for precious memories of domestic pasts via the anonymous photograph. These prized possessions, once intended to be stuck to refrigerators, thumbed through in albums with intimacy and care, are now displayed for all to pillage through in estate sales. Now void of their original context and stripped of identity, these objects exist with bent corners, faded coloring and patinas offering endless narratives. The more antique images I discover, I wonder what photographs from present day would look like in the future. Will we treat the digital decay of a photograph as fondly as a well-worn print corner or a faded and stained image in a frame? Through digital manipulation via binary code corruption of these found vernacular photographs, I am reassigning image value within a social archive. The new image creates a questioning of the societal shift from storing and exchanging analogue images to the storing and sharing of the digital files, and ones intra/interpersonal relationship to this imagery.     

Nick Schietromo lives and works in Quincy, Massachusetts.
To view more of Nick's work, please visit his website.