Spanning 50 years and three generations, Joe’s Junk Yard is a personal narrative that explores the achievement and subsequent demise of the American Dream. Lisa Kereszi’s grandfather was a first-generation American and boxer-turned-junkman, who built an empire of used cars and scrap metal in Chester, Pennsylvania, during the 1950s boom era, which was gradually eroded by a series of misfortunes. Kereszi’s disquieting, tender photographs of the last decade of the junkyard, accompanied by business ephemera and family scrapbook photographs, tell the story of this family and its struggles with a changing economy, urban decline, family feuds, tragic and untimely deaths and the challenges of an independent business. In this photographic series, begun before she pursued formal studies in photography and continued during her years at Bard College and at Yale University, Kereszi repeatedly locates themes and motifs of impermanence and loss in the landscape of the junkyard.
Featured image, "Patty working on car in flame outfit" (2003), is reproduced from Lisa Kereszi: Joe's Junk Yard.
"My father, Joe Jr., ran the family junkyard, and my mother, for a time, had an antique shop… I am truly a product of the idea of one man’s trash being another man’s treasure. The whole junkyard story is a long one, and it includes all the trappings of a dramatic novel or movie—money, near bankruptcy, family feuds, violence, drugs, death, suicide. I began taking pictures there as a teenager, and soon realized that having such a place to roam in was special. This book pays homage to the hopes and failures of the American Dream."
Photographer Lisa Kereszi's highly anticipated photobook, Joe's Junk Yard (already featured on Cool Hunting and CNN, to name a few media outlets), releases this week. Scroll down for a selection of images from the book, which documents the demise of Kereszi's family's failing junk business. continue to blog
In the Friday, October 19 edition of The New York Times, Dana Jennings highlights books by artists whose work bubbles up from "unexpected fissures." Of photographer Lisa Kereszi's autobiographical 'Joe's Junk Yard', from which the featured image, at left, is reproduced, Jennings writes, "Ms. Kereszi had me from her first photograph of a sprawling squall of deceased tires. I burned lots of time in junkyards as a kid, and Ms. Kereszi’s junkscapes, shot at a Chester, Pa., yard that was in her family for over 50 years, ferried me to a genial place, where the oil-soaked soil glittered with galaxies of shattered glass. Ms. Kereszi is on the faculty of the Yale School of Art these days, but she realizes that stack upon stack of tortured Detroit steel is her legacy. A junkyard: what a perfect place for an artist to be born."For Jennings' review of the evocative vintage surf photographs of Ron Church, California to Hawaii 1960 to 1965, please see The New York Times' Paper Gallery column.
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FORMAT: Hbk, 12 x 9.75 in. / 150 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $55 ISBN: 9788862082303 PUBLISHER: Damiani AVAILABLE: 9/30/2012 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Damiani. Foreword by Larry Fink. Text by Ginger Strand.
Spanning 50 years and three generations, Joe’s Junk Yard is a personal narrative that explores the achievement and subsequent demise of the American Dream. Lisa Kereszi’s grandfather was a first-generation American and boxer-turned-junkman, who built an empire of used cars and scrap metal in Chester, Pennsylvania, during the 1950s boom era, which was gradually eroded by a series of misfortunes. Kereszi’s disquieting, tender photographs of the last decade of the junkyard, accompanied by business ephemera and family scrapbook photographs, tell the story of this family and its struggles with a changing economy, urban decline, family feuds, tragic and untimely deaths and the challenges of an independent business. In this photographic series, begun before she pursued formal studies in photography and continued during her years at Bard College and at Yale University, Kereszi repeatedly locates themes and motifs of impermanence and loss in the landscape of the junkyard.
