The Voyeuristic Archaeologist

Photographer and writer Peter Majerle finds his muse in the unlikeliest of places

One of Majerle's sad but beautiful works.

Image credit: Peter Majerle

Recommended by the Editor

Ordinarily Beautiful

Making the Invisible Visible

Heavy Stuff Indeed

By: David Jarnstrom |   December 2011   |  From the print edition

Almost immediately after sitting down with Peter Majerle to look over his photo collection, I regret our decision to meet over breakfast.  

“You see that tub that looks like it’s filled with old motor oil?” he asks, pointing out a particularly nasty shot. “That’s diarrhea.”

Pushing aside my remaining granola, I flip through an array of images of sordid squatter refuse, dilapidated crack dens and odious piles of hoarder clutter. 

As an employee for DuAll Services, a Twin Cities-based property-preservation firm, Majerle helps clean out and clean up foreclosed homes so banks can better attempt to resell them.

The work is brutal, disgusting and often dangerous—imagine a twisted amalgamation of American Pickers, Dirty Jobs, Hoarders, C.S.I. and COPS. “There’s a certain SWAT team aspect because you’re going into a locked house,” the 32-year-old Columbia Heights native says. “You don’t know who or what’s in there.” 

What he and his co-workers find is rarely pretty—like squatter houses where people have still been using the toilets, despite the water and sewer having long been cut off. “Is there going to be three freezers full of deer meat rotting in the basement? Sometimes there is,” he says. “And we’ve got to get it out.” 

Before cleaning, Majerle documents the carnage with his Nikon camera. The primary purpose of the photos is business, as DuAll needs to estimate how long it will take to remove all traces of a property’s previous occupants. But the amateur photographer—and self-proclaimed “voyeuristic archaeologist”—occasionally finds splendor amidst the debris: sunlight cascading through the cracks of a vacated barn, a dusty cherub figurine keeping watch over an abandoned medicine cabinet, a weathered outboard motor resting on a pile of rusted scrap metal. Some of his work recalls the ordinary, faded beauty of William Eggleston.

Last June, Majerle, who also does communications work for the company, started posting his findings to a blog on DuAll’s website. Paired with his succinct, thoughtful prose (Majerle spent the better part of the last decade as a Costa Rica-based travel scribe), the visuals tell the tale of a uniquely sad era—one that sees homeowners jettisoning their memories and possessions. “The occupants have had ample time to retrieve their belongings,” he explains. “So this is what they’ve chosen to leave behind, and in this manner. You can piece together a lot about a person’s existence just based on that.”

His employers exhibit the photos in DuAll’s Columbia Heights office; Majerle says he’d also like to partner with a local non-profit to exhibit his work in one of the Twin Cities neighborhoods hit particularly hard by foreclosures—a project that would both showcase his art and shed light on a dismal but inescapable phenomenon. 

Displaying the photos “shows a different level of compassion,” Majerle says. “[DuAll is] sensitive to the fact that this is how we’re all making a living—off of somebody else’s loss.”

+ Find Majerle's blog and photos at duallservices.com/blog.