For me, a good photograph is often one nobody would imagine being a good photograph. We rarely see the things around us as being worth recorded, yet they often are the most powerful photographs for me. Garage sales are one of the rituals of death, they are often filled with the pieces of someone’s life, being sent back out into the world. In the country, they are a part of the new macro-economy, a kind of portable sidewalk antique and dollar store. I love what these things say about the woman they belonged to, lined up as silent and voiceless witnesses to a life.

Life and death are the same thing, different ends of the same string, I think. One goes with the other, one is never far from the other.

I often wonder if Maria or my daughter Emma might one day hold a garage sale of my things, my belongings, the pieces of my life. What would they be? My hard drives, lenses? My voodoo and beeswax candles? My statues and muses, my photographs and photos by George Forss? Perhaps my first Ipad, or perhaps my last, the paintings I love, the collars of dogs? Old paper books pulled out of the attic and wondered over by small children?

I hope people will look at these things and scratch their heads over them, piece together the life of the person who owned them, I hope they will say, he must have been interesting, he must have been a dreamer, he must have not been afraid to be strange.Oh yes, I imagine someone saying, my grandmother used to love his books, my Uncle Harry hated him, disagreed with everything he said. I think he was a writer back then, we can check him out on Amazon, they’ll have a link to his books there.

But by the time they get home, they will have forgotten about that,  and why wouldn’t they, the dead have had their turn at the wheel, they might take my little Homer Simpson statue and give it to their teenage son, it might be cool. He was after all, my role model as a father.