I just started rolling out my new project, Postcards from America. Here’s the first batch of six. On Mon-Wed-Fri I add an image on my blog, and crosspost it to my homepage and the Prints gallery. Black-and-white but a bit of color as well. Over time there will be a lot of Washington DC-area shots since that’s where I’ve lived and dug into life the most.
I think of these as alt-postcards, obviously not the standard sugarcoated view but something more personal, authentic, and hopefully magical from inside the American lived landscape. My daughter’s third birthday is in there. Lovers in a New York City restaurant. The Christmas tree my mom’s late partner rigged up on a diving platform so his dying friend could see it from his bedroom window, then it became a yearly community tradition.
While it’s just starting it’s already gotten me thinking - not just about my work but my country. I’m living abroad but pretty fixated on America right now. I’m bracing to return soon to a home that has changed in my absence. I’m writing and posting to help me process, to work out how to go forward creatively while staying afloat and being helpful to others.
I can assure you I’m rested and ready to be helpful.
Unlike projects I’ve shot with a particular idea in mind, Postcards is a reimagined, retroactive compilation of older photos from my photographic life in the US, part of a recent deep dive into grappling with my archive. Outtakes from assignments, projects, personal walkabouts, dinners, weddings, etc. Everyday life.
Even when I was on a job, I usually looked for photos for myself, little vignettes that just felt right to me (even if the client wouldn’t necessarily agree). Now I’m going back and finding them again, to see what kind of vision or idea they add up to, if any.
Obviously part of that is asking myself if they are any ‘good’ as photos. Sometimes it takes quite a while to know. I’m discovering how your perspective changes with the times, and can alter the way you interpret your own work. To me, the best photos often can universalize beyond their original context. So in that way a photo from a wedding or Washington DC can also reflect America more broadly.
I see them as people, places, and things I was fond of, following my enchantments. But as we cross a kind of rubicon into a new American reality, they also serve as time capsules from the before-times.
I can’t help but feel like an anthropologist, or an archaeologist sifting through evidence:
This is who we were. This is who I was. How did it lead to where we are now? Are there clues? What do they mean?
Which makes me think of The White Ribbon, director Michael Haneke’s bleak but masterful 2009 black-and-white film. It drops us in a German village just prior to WWI, where strange, even disturbing things are happening. A barn burns. People are injured or even killed in freak incidents. People disappear. We get fleeting hints of cruelty and abuse under the seemingly stable surface of life in the village. While blame begins to fall on the local children, there is never a clear resolution.
Nothing ever really adds up. Like in life, especially these days.
I remember reading about how the film was meant in part as a way to look back at pre-war Germany and the seeds of what was about to arrive. How did Germans, these people we see going about their business in the film, become what they became? What caused their ‘break’, some contagion? What about us? What contagion has caused our ‘break’?
I don’t suggest that my photos have such dark foreboding. So far I think there’s love and beauty and even some humor in them, at least that’s how I see them now. Not nostalgia exactly, maybe a wistful affection for what was and can maybe be again.
Despite everything, I’m coming back still hopeful and a stubborn optimist. While I’m looking back with these photos, of course you can never go back, and I wouldn’t want to.
I’m fighting for what’s next.