Editor’s note: This story is written by Playboy Club creator Griffin Maria.
They say, “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” Well, if there’s any truth to that statement then the junkyard out in Wittman, AZ is a tucked away vault of riches. And for many years it was home to the annual Junkyard Shootout where, if you live by the saying, you’ll find plenty of treasure, loot, and, well…booty.
For a string of several years, the Junkyard Shootout, hosted by Arizona-based photographer James Sasser, was an open invitation to models and photographers to come together and create beautiful art amongst the urban decay. The junkyard itself is home to the rusted remains of countless wrecks, boasting their scars in the form of shattered windshields, crumpled doors, and twisted frames. It’s a graveyard turned playground, so to speak, and if your tetanus shot is up to date, there’s no shortage of interesting backgrounds to work with. A hollowed-out school bus sits atop a stack of stones, busted boats are forever landlocked, and I swear there’s an old creepy truck way in the back of the lot that looks like it was plucked straight out of Jeepers Creepers.
I attended the Shootout just about every year from 2017 until the swan song in 2023. Everywhere you looked stood a figment of yesterday. You could tick off the decades by the model of car, dusty license plate, or piece of outdated technology scattered throughout the grounds. Sometimes you felt like you’d stepped into the Mad Max universe, but there was something strangely beautiful about this wasteland: something alluring enough to bring a crowd of creators back year after year.
Models wandered the grounds where they could shoot content independently or collaborate with a number of talented photographers. Each year would also bring out a handful of, let’s call them “special guests.” Over the years I saw musicians, cosplayers, a local fire truck, a horse wrangler, the “snake lady,” and a fire breather, just to name a few. Sometimes the junkyard would take on an almost circus-like atmosphere with so many seemingly out-of-place things coming together in one location at one time. The magic of the event, though, was that somehow it all worked. Here, among the chaos, it all made sense. As the band Frou Frou says in their song “Let Go,” there’s beauty in the breakdown.
The Junkyard Shootout holds a special place in my heart for a few reasons. Nostalgia is a main ingredient; after all this is a place filled with old memories, most of which are left to rot under the hot Arizona sun. But for me, these memories are still fresh and vibrant. Over the course of several years, I shot content with fellow Playboy Creator Kristina (Kiss Kris). Together we made a lot of extremely fun content that simply couldn’t have happened anywhere else. And looking back at some of those early photo shoots is a wild ride down memory lane.
Like the sea of rust that lingers, the Junkyard Shootout is now a thing of the past that I’ll look back on fondly. I’ve got some wild memories that I’ll cherish, and some that I might recall while shaking my head in wonder. Did I really let a six-foot snake slither over my naked body? Was that the smell of my own hair on fire? Maybe one of these days I’ll publish all of my photos together in a coffee table collection…I’ll call it Griffin’s “scrap” book.
Griffin Maria is on The Playboy Club. Talk to her now.
