Wish You Were Here
(2024-Present)
Inserting myself into vintage chrome postcards (2003).
An early confluence of my passion for collecting and a burgeoning interest in photography was via a set of vintage postcards belonging to my grandparents. Their uniformity in dimension, subject matter, and style had a profound impact on my artistic sensibilities; inspiring me to explore the concept of seriality in my work, creating images that are cohesive in style and theme.
The repetition found in the notecard sized postcards, along with the functional aesthetic in the imagery of mundane buildings, motels, and highways repeated over and over, created a sense of order and rhythm: a subtle underlying structure that I found both grounding and liberating.
An early experiment consisted of digitally inserting myself in existing postcards, as the traveler typically unseen by the recipient. In parallel to my Polaroid project, the need to venture out and explore burst out of me. With my camera I physically recorded new locales visited and with the postcards I extended my reach artificially.
Any roadside attraction worth
its weight in salt has a postcard. How else would you be able to prove you went anywhere?
Happy to report that the
Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas is alive and well. I went in reverse order; visiting first and buying the postcard years later.
Shartlesville, Pennsylvania (2017)
Mystery Spot. St. Ignace, Michigan, 2021.
Gravity defying feats at various Mystery Hill and Mystery Spot tourist traps around the country,
Salton Sea, California (2021)
Postcards from my collection curated thematically.
In the summer of 2021 I spent two weeks travelling across the country solo as an early 40th birthday present to myself. I mostly kept to myself; sleeping in the car most nights; and eating my own food. With a few exceptions, my only communication was a few dozen postcards I sent to friends from places of relevance to them: my friend Peter grew up in Minnesota, so I mailed him a postcard from Minneapolis; Todd and I had a poignant night in Utah so his postcard was mailed from Salt Lake City.
Dodd lived in Las Vegas for several years so I chose Nevada as my drop sight for his correspondence. That particular day was a bit brutal. I drove a long time through the desert, let myself get dehydrated, nearly fainted outside the Clown Motel, and capped the day with a speeding ticket. I was out of it and nearly at the California border when a lone mailbox appeared out of nowhere. I dropped in my correspondence, raised the flag, and kept moving. Dodd got it. Thank you NDOT!
Teotihuacán, Mexico (2024)
A subset of postcards I’ve honed in on, is postcards depicting lobsters. Postcards from the New England area lean on the abundance (to a comic degree) of the quintessential local cuisine available in abundance to tourists. Of particular interest to me is the reuse of stick lobster imagery as well as depictions of the stereotypical New England fisherman.
Brooklyn, New York (2017)
Hamtramck, Michigan (2003)
Nevada Desert (2021)
Santa Rosa, New Mexico (2004)
Wildwood, New Jersey (2016)
Lakeville, Minnesota, (2015)
Cape May, New Jersey (2015)
Detroit, Michigan (2020)
Bear Lake, Michigan, (2018)
Osseo, Wisconsin (2021)
An Unsolved Mystery: I bought a collection of 11 postcards at an antique shop in Hawaii.
The postcards chronicle someone’s
cross country bus trip from November 1955.
Is there enough information here to put a name to this unknown traveler?