©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

Fifteen Vaults explores the precarious narratives of aging in our contemporary world. From Eggy Press, Brandon Tauszik explores the isolation and grief of aging and death through a portrait of his grandmother. Tauszik takes us through his personal journey of the domestic objects left in boxes after the passing of his grandmother. As she lived an isolated life, Tauszik was not as close as many are with their grandparents, yet the images explore intimate experiences. The layout of the monograph allows the viewer to travel and experience these feelings with Tauszik. We can feel the distance, separation, and familiarity with the objects and owner. With a variation in full-bleed spreads, large white pages with detailed images, and small fold-out narratives, the monograph requires us to dig through the images as Tauszik dug through the remaining boxes. Fifteen Vaults is an impressive view and experience of death, loss, and what remains in our contemporary culture.

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

Brandon Tauszik (born 1986) is a self-taught photographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, CA. Tauszik’s work examines elements of America’s social periphery and has appeared in places like The Washington Post, The Guardian, British Journal of Photography, and more. He is the recipient of a 2018 grant from the Pulitzer Center and is a 2023 fellow at Stanford University’s Starling Lab.

Follow Brandon on Instagram: @be_dizzle

Follow Eggy Press on Instagram: @eggypress

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

Fifteen Vaults

Photographer Brandon Tauszik rarely met his grandmother. Estranged from the family, Shirley Tauszik had been living alone for three decades at a Massachusetts YMCA 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.

Through a series of 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. Incorporating archival images, repetition, and creative layout, Tauszik brings us inside his subject as he attentively documents the cascade of unremarkable objects his father discovered there: piles of battered furniture, hundreds of unread books, reams of stockpiled toilet paper and non-perishable goods, boxes of expired medications.

Amidst the detritus, Tauszik’s camera homes in on Lowell as he attends to the labor rituals of death in America. With rolled-up sleeves and muscles tense, we watch the elder Tauszik physically grapple with his mother’s legacy, manhandling crumbling storage boxes with the loving firmness of a son performing his final filial duty. Free from sentiment for a mother he hardly knew, Lowell eventually finds catharsis in the material destruction of her possessions. Meanwhile, he is forging a deeper bond with his own son, the artist, effectively breaking the cycle of neglect that defined his relationship with his own parents.

Fifteen Vaults asks us to consider the fallout of separation over time. Personal effects are usually coveted—heirlooms to pass down to the next generation in hopes of keeping memory alive. But what happens when the attendant search for meaning comes up flat? As Tauszik explains, “if we were looking for significance in those sealed boxes, we found only junk.”

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.

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

©Brandon Tauszik, Fifteen Vaults

Epiphany Knedler is an interdisciplinary artist + educator exploring the ways we engage with history. Using Midwestern aesthetics, she creates images and installations exploring histories. She is based in Aberdeen, South Dakota serving as a Lecturer of Art and the co-curator for the art collective Midwest Nice Art. Her work has been exhibited in the New York Times, Vermont Center for Photography, Lenscratch, Dek Unu Arts, and awarded through the Lucie Foundation, F-Stop Magazine, and Photolucida Critical Mass.

Follow Epiphany Knedler on Instagram: @epiphanysk