After retiring from a high-stress career spanning thirty years as an interventional radiologist in 2012, Dallasite Norm Diamond was ready to embark on something entirely different during his newfound free time. As he explains, he went looking to capture emotion through photography— “some of the emotions I had experienced but not felt for some time.” On a whim, he stopped by an estate sale. Wandering through the house filled with a stranger’s relics, Diamond spotted a framed photo on the bedroom nightstand. “The man was middle-aged, confidently looking at the camera, dressed in a formal white dinner jacket—the master of his domain,” explains Diamond. The image—and its price tag of $2.50, implications he says, of “a life ended and of little worth”—made a lasting impression on him.

From then on, Diamond was hooked. For the next year, he frequented up to ten Dallas-area estate sales each week, documenting objects, moments, and mementos fraught with sentiment. The collection of photographs appears in his book, What is Left Behind—Stories from Estate Sales, coming out in May. Scouting out estate sales in as many different neighborhoods as he could find in the classifieds and setting a spending limit of $25 per sale, he brought home a selection of curated pieces, everything from intimate handwritten letters to wooden toy trains. He experimented with lighting and multiple camera settings to set the mood of each shot. The resulting photos come together as a fascinating study on objects-as-storytellers and the fleeting reality of value.

“There is nothing like an estate sale to remind me of my own mortality and life’s brevity,” Diamond says. “Children’s toys often sit a few feet away from wheelchairs. Despite having gone to innumerable sales, this portent of what ultimately lies ahead still jars me whenever I go. I lose myself in random thoughts of the past, the choices I have made, and the dreams I never pursued. Do other buyers sense their mortality as intensely as I do at these sales? When I see them shopping for bargains with voracious single-mindedness, I wonder: Perhaps browsing and buying chases away those thoughts of death. In the end, in some form, that is what we all do.”

 

Diamond found websites where one can enter a zip code and find all the estate sales in the vicinity. On any given weekend, there might be twenty to forty sales within a reasonable driving distance from his house. Along his photographic journey, Diamond discovered doors with blue tape across them, signaling the rare private spaces customers weren't permitted to enter.
Photograph by Norm Diamond
The estate sale websites display a selection of the items one can purchase. These generally include stuff that will attract the most buyers—furniture, jewelry, dishes—but Diamond was most interested in the unusual and offbeat, so he would have to guess which sales would have the quirkiest things. After some months, he found that middle- and lower-middle-class homes tended to have his favorite pieces.
Photograph by Norm Diamond
Because most of the sales Diamond visited were in Dallas, newspapers and memorabilia related to the Kennedy assassination appeared often. Two of the photographs in the book relate to the assassination, which greatly affected Diamond. “Living in Dallas for many years has reminded me of it often,” he says.
Photograph by Norm Diamond
One of the items Diamond treasures most is a wooden yellow airplane missing its propeller, which he took home and photographed underneath his son’s childhood bed. “Although he is grown, there was an old candy wrapper and a thumbtack under the bed that I included in the picture,” he says. “It brought back memories of him as a boy.”
Photograph by Norm Diamond
"This shot is one of the first photos from the project and one of my favorites. Of course, the beautiful light shining through the bathroom window drew me in, but more important to me was the poignancy of the scene: a new generation selling off the lacy negligee of perhaps their grandmother, who was once young but is now at the end of life or perhaps deceased," he says.
Photograph by Norm Diamond
"At another sale, I encountered a complete collection of Playboy magazines dating from the fifties to the present," Diamond says. "Ironically, they were situated on the family hearth."
Photograph by Norm Diamond
“The old TV that is on the cover of the book is also very special for me,” Diamond says. “It reminds me of watching black-and-white television with my parents and sister in our family home in Iowa many years ago.”
Photograph by Norm Diamond
"This is the best closet I found during the project. It is from another time and also typically Texan, with the hats," Diamond says. "The Old Spice just added a quirkiness that appealed to me. A closet is an unusual place to display cologne."
Photograph by Norm Diamond
Diamond bought the LBJ plate and the fishhooks on the same day. When he returned home, he placed the fishhooks on the plate, looking to capture the contrast of the hooks' sharpness and the fuzzy fly material.
Photograph by Norm Diamond
Diamond came across all sorts of humorous displays, as with this one: the for-sale information written directly on the wall above a toilet paper holder. It still had the last remnant of toilet paper hanging from the cardboard cylinder.
Photograph by Norm Diamond
"I bought this photo negative at the end of a sale on a Sunday when the sellers were trying to get rid of all the last-minute unsold items. The cracks and spots in it tell us that it was taken years ago and has fallen into neglect," Diamond says. "The unknown man in the picture, however, appears to be in the prime of his life."
Photograph by Norm Diamond
"Vinyl records are ubiquitous at estate sales. It is not unusual to see resellers sort through stacks of records that might appeal to eBay customers," Diamond says. "The graphics of the records in angled stacks appealed to me."
Photograph by Norm Diamond
"In my experience, most people visit estate sales to find items that will in some way enhance their day-to-day lives. My interest was entirely different. I focused on the emotional content of the merchandise for sale," Diamond says. "In the possessions of people I never knew, I sought to find something of theirs that touched me in some way, that informed me of what their life was like, and somehow connected me to my own memories of family and history."
Photograph by Norm Diamond
The least expensive item that Diamond photographed from his estate sale sojourns was a Marilyn Monroe puzzle, which he purchased for a mere 50 cents. "I like how the light strikes the box, particularly the three lines at the bottom."
Photograph by Norm Diamond
"One of the most memorable items I found was an old letter I purchased for a dollar. It was dated June 1917 and in penmanship not seen nowadays, a spurned woman wrote her lover asking why he no longer cared," Diamond says. "There was a timelessness and universality to it. In today’s world, it would have been written digitally and with markedly different syntax, but the emotion would be identical."
Photograph by Norm Diamond