Wish You Were Here
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.
Salton Sea, California (2021)
Mystery Spot. St. Ignace, Michigan, 2021.
Gravity defying feats at various Mystery Hill and Mystery Spot tourist traps around the country,
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)
Shartlesville, Pennsylvania (2017)
Shartlesville, Pennsylvania (2017)
Shartlesville, Pennsylvania (2017)
An Unsolved Mystery: I found a collection of 11 postcards at an antique shop in Hawaii chronicling someone’s cross country bus trip in November 1955. Do you think there is enough information to put a name to this unknown traveler?