In 2017, New York–based marketing consultant Rodney "Ferris Bueller" Bailey (born 1979) documented the contents of his old room in his parents' house in Queens, New York—full of ephemera collected while growing up in the late '80s and '90s, and largely untouched since. His mementos include magazines, posters, photos, collages, T-shirts, concert tickets and a Walkman; his extensive collection of sneakers dominates the book, triggers vivid personal memories (expressed in texts throughout the image sequence) and makes palpable a past where The X-Files, Nirvana and Anna Nicole Smith were still current news. Catharsis is both a chronicle of Bueller's sometimes difficult youth and a "record of life before the Internet or social media, before everyone knew what everyone else was doing all the time … the only things that would connect you were clothes, sneakers and music."
