Old worlds, holding their breath – photos of elderly familiars

After Bootsy Holler’s grandmother Ruby died in 1978, her grandfather Willie lived alone there till his death in 2002, in the basement and kitchen and not touching any of the other rooms. For him, they were shrines to the life he had lost.

Holler began documenting the house in 2001. It’s all gone now, and these photos are the only evidence of how it looked in the 23 years between her grandparents’ deaths. Holler’s description of the project here, on her Web site.

(Click images to enlarge.)

Erika Langley:

Annie and Vera Piccola, my great-aunts, always lived in the same house
next to the railroad tracks in Chicora, Pennsylvania,
a place nicknamed “Goosetown” for the bleat of the oil wells. Neither
ever married or left, and the house remained perfectly intact.
The train would pass the house daily, at noon and at seven, marking the
sameness of another day, the sureness of time.
When they were in their eighties I began to document their vanishing
world.