Fifteen Vaults
2024
Second edition of Fifteen Vaults by Brandon Tauszik (2024)
Medium format paperback in new condition
Signed by Brandon Tauszik to title page
About
Photographer Brandon Tauszik rarely met his grandmother. Estranged from the family, Shirley Tauszik had been living alone at a YMCA for decades before she passed away in 2020. Once Brandon's parents began receiving substantial monthly invoices from a storage facility in rural Massachusetts, he and his father Lowell were tasked with sorting the enigmatic contents of fifteen enormous, wooden storage vaults.
By unpacking the empty grief of estrangement, Tauszik uncovers the alienation running through the contemporary family experience. His intuitive photographs are punctuated by brief texts, including a copy of Shirley Tauszik’s obituary and an interview with Lowell Tauszik in which father and son discuss the legacies of mental illness and abandonment, and the remedial power of love.
Through lushly realized black-and-white photographs, Fifteen Vaults is an unsparing commentary on loneliness and aging, and a deeply personal meditation on the brittleness of family ties in the face of modern life and death.