I've lived surrounded by old and antique things from as far back as I can remember. My father's a dealer—it started with cameras, before all of that turned digital. He used to sell film cameras, books, lenses, old photography bric-a-brac—anything related to taking pictures in the pre-digital days.
He was a photographer first, and I was his stand-in or model sometimes when he needed to rehearse a shot for furniture or portraiture. I was just his helper otherwise—loading the van, rearranging chairs, or setting up a booth. Our weekends were not spent watching football games or movie nights—they were spent estate-selling, browsing antique shops, flea-marketing, and visiting museums.
I was surrounded by objects that had already lived whole lives by the time I brought them into my hands.
My parents say my first profession was as a junk-picker—just like my old man. And honestly? They were correct. Fast forward to today, and you could call me a creative junk-picker, I guess. I find beauty and potential in what others discard.
My own initial real "collection" was fossil rocks—little ones that you'd notice along creek beds or on the side of the road. My dad even gave me a cabinet to put them in. I obsessed over the textures, the age they were from. Already, maybe I understood that things tell stories, even though they can't talk them out loud.
I was also a Legos person. They weren't collectibles to me—more like a language. I could build, re-arrange, bring whole worlds to life. I regret that I let people bully me out of that. I would have likely built incredible things by now. But that is another story entirely.
About five years ago, something creatively changed. I started working on what I've termed my Modernized Painting Series. I take old images—perhaps photographs or paintings—and I tamper with them. Maybe I cover faces with colored dots in a panoramic photo, or abstracify parts of a 19th-century print. It's a visual interrupt. A way of both honoring and challenging memory, identity, anonymity.
That's when I got serious about collecting. I started going to estate sales regularly—not just with my father, but as my own person. I started shopping for material to use in artwork, to sell, and to be honest, the excitement of searching. You never know what you'll find, or who you'll meet. The community is small and intricately intertwined, and soon I started running into people who knew my father—or had heard of me because of him.
I was getting bored one evening and started digging deeper online. And that's where I ended up in this huge, lively community of vintage photography collectors and dealers—mostly through Facebook groups. I was already buying on eBay and Etsy, but this was different. It was more personal. You could swap, message people, listen to the histories behind the collections.
Since then, I've been buying, scanning, cataloging, trading, and occasionally selling old photographs. I scan most of everything. I dream of building this massive source library—something artists, creatives can draw from for inspiration, repurpose, or just look back at. I keep a lot of the hard copies, to sell, to display, to integrate into new work later.
Some people have given me photos for free, and I’ve done the same. There's a kind of barter system in this world, one based not only on value but on shared reverence. These aren’t just images—they’re fragments of lives that might’ve otherwise vanished. Preserving them feels like an act of care.
I still go to sales. I still post online that I am looking. I still get excited at the unknown of what an old attic is going to yield.
And having been diagnosed for autism, I learned the language for what all this is:
It's my special interest.
It's a thing I find myself going back to over and over. The thing that never, ever fails. The thing I could talk about endlessly, obsessively plan, and get lost in until time ceases to have meaning.
And beyond that—it's who I am. This obsession with lost photos, lost things, lost individuals. it's how I get time to fit. It's how I connect when words fail.
To others, they're nothing more than dusty old photos.
To me, they're snapshots of presence.
Even if no one remembers their names.