“At the sales, Diamond looked for objects that communicated something about their owner’s life. Often, the belongings left over when a person died were testaments to loss, long illnesses, or the kind of poverty that conditions people to hold on to things, just in case they come in handy one day. Other times, what was left over was more sentimental. He saw a closet filled with Stetsons and bottles of Old Spice, a wig stored inside a box made for caramels, birth announcements for three children born between 1909 and 1913. Some days, he photographed those items as he found them. Other days, he bought items—always under $25— that caught his eye, and photographed them at his home in better light. He still has boxes of the stuff.
In one picture, a toilet paper holder, with a depleted cardboard roll still dangling off it, with its price written on the wall in Sharpie. Diamond’s title for the image? Everything Must Go.
Things, in the end, don’t make winners or losers, and they don’t save us from death. But they do tell stories about how we’ve lived.”