It was just last year when Gloria Baker Feinstein and her husband had to move out of their house and into a condo, and get rid of many their possessions.
"It's not stuff," she said. "Everything had a reason. Everything had a memory. Everything felt really dear to me."
The couple had an estate sale, and Feinstein, a photographer, decided to document each item as it left her house. But the endeavor quickly turned into a different project -- one that is now on display in a local gallery.
"The first person who came out was holding two Kentucky snow globes, so I started to photograph the snow globes," Feinstein said. "And then I pulled back a bit, and I realized that the woman who was holding the snow globes was so fantastic, and so colorful, and so lovely, that it would be wrong of me not to take a picture of her."
And thus the project was born. Feinstein spent the next three days photographing the strangers who were buying her possessions: from a cheerful man holding garden shears, to a woman who found a duck lamp and a "gruff" man with a doll bed.
Nine of the photos from the project are featured as part Feinstein's retrospective exhibit called "Can You See Me Now?" on display at The Bohemian Gallery in Overland Park, Kan. Her work will be featured at the gallery until June 14. (The project was also written up in Lens, a New York Times photography blog.)
