eBay isn’t a social media platform. There are sellers and buyers, not friends and followers. Any use of the messaging system is purely focused on transaction. Search terms are optimized for finding rare items - quickly and under preferred conditions and costs. eBay isn’t for (intentional) jokes. With users so entwined with their items-for-sale, any glimmer of personality on this platform is a thrill.
This edition of N4N focuses on the eBay seller dv33, who I know very little about other than they have been selling since 2000, they are from Phoenix, Arizona, and they have a healthy sense of humor. In focusing on a single eBay seller’s store - rather than a single object or genre of items - browsing this particular collection is like being at a garage sale. Similarly, I believe the items people leave for free on their Brooklyn stoops reveal a lot about them — or who they used to be, considering what they’re giving away.
When I see charming portraits being sold at antique stores, I wonder under what circumstances they were discarded by their owners or why they were not inherited by their subjects. dv33 detaches from this sentimentalist trap by projecting their own (often dark or crude) stories on the images. Traditional eBay category search terms that summon particular algorithms: (i.e., years, size of image, subject) are joined with wacky and concise one-liners to produce something combative and anti-genre such as: Vintage 1920s photo / Future President Tears The Hair Out of Raggedy Ann Doll.
I’m thinking about Barthes alongside these images as a way to reckon with both my connection to the subjects and the comedic impact of description:
The punctum is a “detail” for which I am not prepared—”a partial object” that imposes itself (or seems to impose itself) on the photographic field suddenly and violently (43).
The punctum of a photograph is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me) (96).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
The image that introduced me to dv33’s collection was the 1971 mini photo / Lovely Young Woman with Hair in Bun and Brain on Drugs (below). The hair style and the high-neck sweater are stiff and structured, like the bonnets and gowns popular in fashions of centuries past. It reminds me of women subjects in early painted portraiture assuming the traditional 3/4 turned pose. As the title suggests with its reference to 1970s drugs and the styles produced from hair-sprayed-back-combing - despite all our projections and allusions, she’s timeless.
Punctum is the unnamable *thing* the image points to. Punctum is the uncanny.