About Junk Shop Photos

What Is Junk Shop Photos?

Junk Shop Photos is a photo blog updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday with a new photograph retrieved from the dusty corners of an old junk shop.

Sometimes the photos have stuff written on them, sometimes they don't. Sometimes I can determine their dates, sometimes I can't. They're presented as-is, never enhanced or restored.

Adding your own captions or comments to the photos is highly encouraged.

Why Did You Create It?

Whenever I find a good junk shop, I look for three things: tiki objects, vintage cameras and the inevitable box of other people's discarded, old photographs. The first, when I'm lucky enough to find them, go on my tiki patio. The second, on shelves around my apartment. The third, at least for a while, were simply transferred to a different box, which I kept in my closet.

As my photo collection grew, however, I knew I had to do something with it. These enigmatic moments of personal history had been lost for too long already. It was time to reveal them to a new audience — one that would appreciate them more than their former owners apparently had. And so, Junk Shop Photos was born.

What Made You Start Collecting Old Photos?

In the spring of 2007, a friend of mine introduced me to a fantastic junk shop in Austin, Texas. I spent what was probably, to the eventual dismay of said friend, a good two hours digging through shelves of dusty treasures, snatching up items like a large glass fishing float and an armload of vintage cameras. And though I didn't give it much thought at the time, I also snagged a small, sepia snapshot from atop a laundry basket full of old photographs. It occurred to me that its tropical World War II-era subject matter would fit right in on the wall of my developing tiki patio.

In the weeks that followed, I became increasingly fascinated with that photo. I wondered who the man in the picture was, where exactly he was standing and why, after all these years, this image of him would end up discarded in a pile of unwanted photos. I also began to wonder the same thing about the hundreds of other pictures. Who were those people and what happened to them that led to their treasured memories being lost and forgotten?

Since then, every visit to a junk shop has included an hour or so of my sitting on the floor, rustling through a box of fragile, curled bits of paper, picking out the most unusual and enigmatic shots from the lives of people I've never met. Except, these days, it's less for the unresolvable speculation and more for the laughs.

— Wesley Treat