Signs of Wear

Revisiting Nancy Kittle’s Photographs of the Marin City Flea Market

Words by Max Goldberg

This autonomy is both the subject and driving force of the color portraits that photographer and lifelong Californian Nancy Kittle made at the Marin City Flea Market, north of San Francisco, in the early 1990s. I first encountered these images during my time processing collections for California Revealed, which is an organization funded by the California State Library to provide free digital preservation and online access services to archives, libraries, and other memory organizations across the state. The Marin County Free Library had nominated the photographs for digitization just as the project, which was then still known as the California Audiovisual Preservation Project, was expanding its scope beyond audiovisual recordings. The nomination was immediately intriguing—one always wishes for more documentation of ephemeral sites of exchange—but we could not have expected the humor, pathos, and intense color saturation of Kittle’s photographs. Alternately playful and proud, ruminative and stern, the subjects are sharply individuated and unfailingly interesting. Many might be taken for mythic figures, the kind who spin straw into gold or guard unfathomable treasure. 

Salvaging the salvagers from the rush of time, Kittle’s photographs remind us that flea markets make for surprising juxtapositions of different people, cultures, and even historical periods. Observe the picture of a young girl leaning out of an ancient truck over a table of similarly worn dolls, the whole image seeming to riff on Dorothea Lange. So too the photographs of mannequin limbs and masks and oddly placed mirrors call in the debt owed by the original surrealists to their flea market finds outside Paris. Just as Kittle’s photographs capture the vagaries of Bay Area weather—from overcast skies to sunbathing splendor in the space of a few hours—they are similarly revealing of the dance of decades at the flea. I can’t imagine these pictures’ subjects would be surprised to find that 90s fashions are now back in vogue. 

Spend any time trying to preserve the historical record, and you find it won’t stay put. Present circumstances change, and some piece of the past is there waiting. I adored Kittle’s photographs from the first—who wouldn’t?— but they resonate differently after the Covid year, which has reduced so much of our commerce to mere clicks. To be sure, this story doesn’t begin with the pandemic or even the internet. Here is Luc Sante writing in The Other Paris:

The Marin City Flea Market suffered the same fate, ousted by a shopping plaza in 1995. But even as we recognize the through lines of displacement and dematerialization, the transformations wrought by this past year are of a different order. You may have heard, for example, that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’s net worth grew $75 billion in 2020. There’s been a shift in manners too, with the pandemic normalizing home delivery of everything you need and much more that you don’t. It remains to be seen to what extent this dispensation will outlast the pandemic, but big tech lives to capitalize on habit. 

That’s why Kittle’s photographs now strike me as not only beautiful but useful. They bring rushing back some of the color, cosmopolitanism, and character that is always absent from the online marketplace, no matter how curated or conscientious. Looking through the images now, I think how the serendipitous find has been replaced by data-driven nudges; bargaining by the lure of free shipping; creative reuse by “frustration-free packaging”; actual conversation by product research; the sheer spectacle of stuff by the invisible labor that sustains the illusion of “frictionless” shopping. And in place of the seller’s searching gaze, represented so beautifully by Kittle’s photographs, is the pervasive surveillance that makes a fetish of advertising. The cult of the consumer cheapens everything, even the person buying. Sure, flea market vendors can be surly, capricious, and outright intimidating. But they can also pull things out of you that are way beyond the reckoning of any algorithm.

I never went to the Marin City Flea Market, but it’s a good bet I was along on my mom’s antiquing expeditions some of the very same weekends that Kittle made her portraits. I wonder how many archivists share these kinds of childhood experiences—and my queasy feeling as to how much of our adult lives revolve around databases. It’s our job as librarians and archivists to ask what the databases are good for. In so doing, we might take inspiration from the flea market vendor’s playbook: show up, talk a good game, risk a bold appraisal. And if we’re going to think like photographers, let it be ones like Nancy Kittle, who on the evidence of these photographs saw no conflict between preserving the moment and being alive to it. She died in 2020, after a lifetime working on projects both descriptive of and contributing to the common good.  

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