When his grandmother died at age 90, Brandon Tauszik barely knew her. He knew her first name, Shirley; his face, barely. She had lived alone, far away, in a YMCA social center, for decades. Did her father, Lowell, know her better? So little… She abandoned him when he was 7 years old. He paid her bills from time to time and helped her find a roof over her head. Nothing more. What he remembered most of all were the quarrels he heard in his childhood nights; this stone that his mother had thrown at his father’s head one evening, overcome by rage. He remembered a mother who gave nothing, or very little. Until this day in 2020, when the announcement of his death reached him.
Shortly after, the Tausziks received invoices from a lost warehouse in rural Massachusetts. Son and grandson go there together. They bury the one who served in the naval army during the Korean War at the Agawam military cemetery. Then they go to the storage room. And there they discovered fifteen enormous wooden chests.
Fifteen Vaults (“Fifteen chests”) is the title that the young 38-year-old photographer, based in California, gave to the project resulting from this disconcerting find. “I left with my camera, as I always do, without imagining for a moment that a project was going to be born”, he admits. In these chests, Shirley Tauszik has piled up the pale treasures of her sad life. Battered armchairs, books by the hundreds, perhaps never read, all stored in dozens of boxes, between rolls of toilet paper and expired medicines.
Sinister Pandora’s Boxes
Immediately, Brandon Tauszik decided to photograph every last detail, in meticulous black and white. He composes with the mountains of cardboard boxes, sinister Pandora’s boxes: full, fed up with jellies, tea bags, Knorr soups and never-unwrapped dolls with ribbons, empty Tropicana bottles, sugar, bags of sandwiches or candies.
The photographer, stunned, strives to preserve the memory of each of the enormous emptied, plywooded, numbered crates; coffins, almost. He immortalizes the accounting entries of the inventories, he also captures, above all, the silhouette of his father, in a tank top, lost in front of these tons of accumulated trash, desperate to look for a sign, a word, a meaning. His father, staring blankly at the finally bare space.
It’s like a funeral that always begins again, an impossible mourning: in this crypt symptomatic of Diogenes’ syndrome reigns the absurd. “We were looking for meaning in these sealed chests, we found only trash”summarizes Brandon Tauszik.
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