Jason Bitner is the co-creator of FOUND Magazine, a show-and-tell project of lost and tossed items. He has been profiled in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Chicago Tribune, and reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and Playboy. Bitner is also a musician whose work been showcased on NPR’s This American Life. He grew up in Illinois, and now splits his time between Chicago and New York.
contact: info@laportebook.com
(photo by Zach Klein)
From Alex Kotlowitz's forward to LaPorte, Indiana:
Jason Bitner has made it a habit of picking up after us, walking down the back alleys of our lives, and accumulating all that we've thrown away or mislaid. And do we ever leave a littered trail. Thankfully, Bitner keeps us from sweeping away our pasts. One afternoon not long ago, over lunch at a small Midwestern diner, Bitner stumbled onto a forgotten archive. Not the kind you'd find at your local university library. It wasn't one that recorded the goings and comings of the rich and powerful, but rather one that caught the quotidian, the everyday motions of those whom Studs Terkel calls "the et ceteras" of the world. . .
What Jason Bitner has assembled here is nothing short of astonishing. And it's unsettling to think that had he not gone to this diner and lingered over his cinnamon rolls, these photographs, these stories might have been discarded or simply lost. Bitner is the equivalent of a nearsighted archeologist. He looks for clues to our lives. Only his time is not measured by eons, but rather in years and decades. And what he finds are hints, to what has transpired and what is about to unfold.
