"This is an assemblage of portraits of things and these objects play on our collective fascination with celebrity, to be sure, but even more they amount to an archive of 20th-century popular culture, composed in the humble and the intimate. Each thing is itself a document, and in the scuffs, scratches , dirt, and wear, we discover traces of bodies both famous and infamous. But isolated from their contexts and owners, these things have our full attention"--Page viii.