It’s my sister who’s the garage sale fan. As far as I’m concerned, other people’s junk is just that -- junk -- and I normally wouldn’t be caught dead searching through used books for something I might want to read or looking through old tablecloths in hopes of finding one the right size for my table and without stains.
But I’d taken my sister out to lunch for her birthday and when she spotted a sign for a sale as we drove back toward her suburban subdivision, well, it was her birthday. How could I refuse to stop?
The house was big, and old, and while this neighborhood might not be as snooty as it had been in, say, the 1930s, there were still expensive cars in the neighboring driveways, Lexuses and Lincolns. It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where one usually sees a yard sale. Maybe, I told myself, the junk wouldn’t be quite as junky as usual.
While my sister hunted happily for bargains, I wandered around just glancing at things and, I must admit, eavesdropping. From the conversations I overheard I soon found out that the elderly owner of the home had passed away recently and had been estranged from his only daughter. He had, however, left his entire estate to her son and daughter, the grandchildren he had never met. They had never met him either, and apparently they had no interest in this house, which must have been shockingly modern when it was built but which now looked a bit run down. Nor were they interested in its art deco furniture or a lifetime’s worth of personal effects. They were interested in the money though, and who can blame them for that?
Still, it seemed a bit sad to see a box of framed family photos mixed in among the bric a brac. A woman stood in front of it, looking at a wedding photo from sometime before the Second World War, to judge from the bride’s dress. That must have been the late owner and his wife, the heirs’ grandparents. Surely they weren’t selling that!
But they were. If they’d never met the grandparents, I guess the photo meant no more to them than it did to the potential buyer, who told me without my asking, as though she were embarrassed, that she was trying to decide if the silver frame was the correct size for one of her own family photos. She decided she would take it and carted it off to haggle over the price. My sister, I saw, was inspecting dusty wineglasses for chips so I began to leaf idly through the rest of the box while I waited for her.
I realized quickly that not all the framed articles in the box were family photos. The old gentleman had collected art of various sorts as well. There were prints in the box too, lithographs or etchings or whatever. I don’t know enough to know the difference. And what I guess you would call “art photos,” landscapes, buildings, still lives. And then I found this photo of a pepper.
It was black and white, very simple, just a single bell pepper. The frame was dusty and the glass was cracked but the photo stopped me in my tracks. That twisted misshapen pepper had a physicality that made my fingers itch to be able to pick it up, feel its weight, stroke its taut green skin. I was sure it was a green pepper, even though the photo was all velvety blacks and luminous grays. And despite its absolute “pepperness,” it made me think of other things as well, a clutching hand, a human heart.
I probably stared at it for a full two minutes before I went to continue through the box. But after glancing at a couple more family photos, I returned to the pepper. I pulled it out of the box. I looked at the price sticker the heirs had affixed. Five dollars. I would have to get it reframed, but still, it was haunting and only five dollars. I paid the grandson for it while the granddaughter wrapped my sister’s new old wineglasses in newspaper. When she offered to wrap my photo too, I told her not to bother, since the glass was already cracked.
When I took it home my husband looked at it and shrugged, but he had no objection since it had been so cheap. It was when I took it to be reframed that things got complicated.
I was just going to buy a standard frame at first, ten bucks or so at Bed Bath & Beyond. But I’d had the pepper propped up on my dresser for a few days till I got around to looking, and somehow none of the frames in the store seemed quite right. Some were too simple, meant for hanging a diploma or a certificate of professional qualification on an office wall. Others were too elaborate, all carved moldings and gilt. There was one style similar to the broken frame, plain black metal, white mat, but the mat was cheap-looking cardboard, the corners of the frame
didn’t fit together tightly, and the black had no depth to it. It didn’t seem worthy of my pepper. So I took the photo to a custom frame shop. After all, I rationalized to myself, the photo itself had been cheap, so the total expense of something lovely to hang on my wall would still be quite reasonable. But I tried to stay with the less expensive options in the frame store. The helpful clerk said it would be ready in about three days, they’d call, and I left.
The next morning the store’s owner called.
“I’m fairly certain this is an original print.” he told me. “You really should use an archival quality mat and frame, not the less expensive ones you picked.”
“It’s a photo,” I said, confused, but wondering if he wasn’t just trying to coax me into spending more. “Aren’t all photos prints?”
“It’s one of Weston’s own prints,” he told me. “It’s signed on the back.”
“Oh no, you’re mistaken. I think the original owner’s name was Hammer. Or maybe Hammond. I don’t remember. I bought it at a garage sale.”
“You bought an original Edward Weston print, of one of his most famous photos, at a garage sale?” He sounded gobsmacked, a word I’d never quite understood till I heard the tone of his voice. “Do you mind if I ask what you paid for it?”
“Five dollars.” That suddenly seemed rather embarrassing, although I still wasn’t sure why.
“Five dollars.” He sounded like he might faint. I wanted to tell him to sit down and put his head between his knees.
So of course I told him to go ahead and frame it the way it ought to be framed, and I agreed he should contact the proper authorities, whoever they might be, and have the photo and signature authenticated, although he assured me he was 99% sure the response would be affirmative. And then I asked him to repeat and spell the photographer’s name for me, so that after we hung up I could go and look Edward Weston up on the internet.
That’s when I found out that Weston was a major figure in the history of art photography, during the 1920s and 30s, right when it was becoming seen as an art form in its own right. The website didn’t do anything as crass as tell me what my photo was worth these days, but it made it
pretty clear it was a bit more than five dollars. Quite a bit more. I sat down and put my head between my knees.
The next day the curator of the photography department of our local art museum called. He was apparently the expert the store owner had contacted about authenticating the photo. He asked for everything I could remember about the garage sale, where exactly it had been, what I could remember hearing about the original owner. He said he needed to research something he called the provenance of the photo.
It was two days after that that I got a call from an attorney who told me that she was representing the heirs of the late George S. Hamner and that on their behalf she was demanding the return of a valuable artwork I had appropriated to myself under false circumstances. If I did not comply a lawsuit would ensue.
They didn’t have a leg to stand on, of course. They had sold it without checking it out. I had paid what they’d asked. I hadn’t even haggled for a reduction in the asking price because of the cracked glass, something my sister had urged me to do.
The costs of the lawsuit were horrific though, even after the heirs had been required to pay court costs. Our lawyer said the heirs and their lawyer had probably begun the suit knowing they couldn’t win if it went to trial, but hoping I would decide a garage sale find wasn’t worth the bother and settle out of court.
By “our lawyer” I mean mine and the museum’s, of course. The museum paid, in exchange for my donating the photo once my ownership was affirmed. We got a nice tax write- off for the donation, and the publicity certainly didn’t do my husband’s contracting business any harm, so I guess we came out ahead in the end. But I miss my pepper. I go visit it in the museum sometimes.