I found a red suitcase while walking through my neighborhood earlier this week, sitting half-opened at the curb beside a trashcan. An old Amtrak tag for Texarkana, Ark., still hung from the handle and a few photos were sticking out, so I re-latched the suitcase and carried it home. Inside I found hundreds of old photos, apparently from a single family and spanning several decades.
In addition to the Polaroids above (and a few cigarette butts and some broken glass), there were many, many more photographs, most of which had gotten wet and stuck together. The emulsion was still soft, and as I pulled them apart, faces and scenes blurred and shifted in color and disappeared, until they resembled tiny Gerhard Richter's. More to come ...