For four years, Justin Kimball photographed inside abandoned homes, hotels, and other buildings across the Northeastern United States, often accompanying his brother Doug, an auctioneer, into the houses of the recently deceased or dispersed. While Doug cleared these spaces of items for potential resale, Justin sought the evidence of an individual’s life: a note, a box of hair pins, a stain on a pillow. These are small, unguarded things, and the book treats them as the real residue of a person’s time in a place. Kimball has said he uses the camera’s descriptive power and the photographic illusion of truth to build a narrative and provoke feeling about its subject; the resulting pictures, in his words, are his perception of what happened in those rooms. The questions he asks are simple and unanswerable: who lived there, what was hidden, what was seen.
Radius Books has produced the volume with attention to its subject. The publisher’s confirmed construction is softbound with a slipcase, and the book contains 60 color images across 128 pages plus a booklet. That booklet gathers Doug Kimball’s writing about his own experiences with the emotional storm that surrounds these objects, their owners, and beneficiaries. His perspective as the person who cleared the houses complements Justin’s photographic one, adding a second voice to the project without displacing the images. The collaboration gives the book a layered account of what it means to sort through what remains.
For a collector, the book’s interest lies in its sustained engagement with a specific subject and in the way text and object are integrated. The photographs are not simply documents of abandonment; they are acts of attention to the overlooked and the discarded, made with a method Kimball has described as using the camera’s descriptive power to imagine the lives that passed through those spaces. The booklet is not an afterword but a parallel record, and the physical book carries the project’s concerns into its form. This is a considered work by a photographer with a distinct project, and it rewards the kind of looking that a collection makes possible.
