idea.collection

When you’re stuck, or in trouble, or maybe just in a hurry, who has time for professional typography? Tom Varisco’s exquisite little book of photographs, Spoiled, turns its lens on the forgotten refrigerators of New Orleans, post hurricane Katrina. It’s a poignant metaphor for loss — for pure perishibility — and it’s rendered through a series of simple photographs of fridges, unmoored and abandoned and still. And this is where the writing comes in: with their facades bearing messages written in anger and haste, the fridge-fronts read as a kind of chorus of plaintive wailings. Somehow, the handwriting anthropomorphizes these impoverished, inanimate objects, making them read as vestigial remnants of the dead: they’re vessels for all that’s expired.