American Post Offices...

There is only one branch of the US government which you have no reason to fear when one of their uniformed agents come to your door.  It is your friendly postal worker.   In our neighborhood,  it is Dave.  He tries hard and does his best to bring us Netflix, holiday greetings,  post cards from friends,  our newsletter from the Willa Cather Society, and other good cheer.  It is not his fault that the bulk of our mail is credit card applications, bills and assorted junk that some company or other thinks we might care about.  I'm sure if it was up to him, it would be nothing but birthday cards, thank you notes, and rebate checks.

Our postman Dave on Lark Street in Albany, NY.

I love the United States Post Office and have had a close working relationship with them since I was a stamp collecting boy.  In my weekly visits  to our little Hewlett, NY Post Office across from the train station, I would bug Mr. Brower, our postmaster for plate blocks of new issues which I might or might not get depending on his mood.  He could be grumpy at times and send you away with a scowl, or magnanimous and grant you your hearts delight.  On occasion,  he might even bestow on me the holy grail of rare issues, a plate block or two of postage due stamps.  It annoys me no end when people complain about the occasional  one or two cent increase in the cost of a postage stamp.  The service is a bargain at twice the price!!!

When I was living in Canada, the importance of the postal system was made clear.  In an effort to cut costs, the Canadian Postal System decided it would privatize and close down the post offices in many small and outlying rural communities (of which there are many in Canada).  There was a huge outcry by these farming/fishing towns stating that their only contact with the government, and in fact their only concrete affirmation of being Canadian was their post office.  Without that, they might as well be living anywhere.   I don't know how it played out, but I felt their pain.  It is now beginning to happen here.  Beware America!!!  "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."

Maybe it's my nostalgic connections, or the fact that a post office can offer a sense of place, especially when the building is an authentic part of the community (and not just a double wide with the USPS logo on it), but lately, I find myself taking more and more pictures of post offices.  The first one I took that caught my eye and started my interest was a little shack in Goodsprings, Nevada, a small, isolated old mining town about 25 or 30 miles south of Las Vegas that is still reasonably populated and undisturbed by time.

I was showing my southwest photos at "Art on Lark", an annual outdoor art festival in Albany, N.Y. including the photo below.  A woman stopped to admire it and said it was one of the best post office photos she has seen.  She said she works for the post office and likes to take pictures of them where ever she goes.  Given her affinity for the subject, it did my best to convince her to buy it, for her own sake because I knew she would regret it later, but alas, no sale.  Maybe she figured she could take it herself next time she is in Nevada.

Taken in 2004, it was the first, and so far the best in terms of representing the lost America of Walker Evans or Bernice Abbott that continues to drive me down the back roads and around the next bend to see what's there and occasionally surprises me with something like this.  Since I am still traveling, this project is a work in progress, so here is a representative sample of what I have come up with so far.

But just to say that today, 7/25/11,  I read a news article that due to their billions of dollars in losses, the post office will be closing 3500 post offices across the US, particularly the smaller (and usually more interesting) ones, so start mailing letters and go out and take a picture of your post office.  It may not be there next year, and you will regret it and all those jokes you made about "snail mail".

Actually this post office is kind of close to home, in Grafton, New York, and kind of looks like it was once a school house.

By all accounts, Jay Em, Wyoming has a population south of 50, so this might be all the post office they need, hope they can keep it.

Sparks, Nebraska.

Other than the church, this post office/general store is the only commercial building in town.  People come here for their mail, they stop, talk, have a cup of coffee, etc.  It is the glue that holds the town, indeed, the country together.  The unseen forces tearing at the fabric of our nation identity are the one's demonizing our sacred post office.  Once they succeed in destroying it by turning Americans against their friend, the postal worker, they have won!!!

Its not the "right to bear arms", its the post office that we have to protect.

The unknown post office.  Just known only by its zip code.  I guess I could look it up, but that would take away the mystery of this brave unheralded soldier on the front lines of the battle to keep people in touch and feeling part of America.

Rulo, Nebraska

Ruskin,  Nebraska

Harrisville,  New York

Angora,  Nebraska.  One of those slated for closure.

Rockport, Mass, The Pigeon Cove Office

Preston Hollow,  New York

Wauneta,  Nebraska

Arapahoe, Nebraska

Medusa, New York

New Bremen, New York

Stuyvesant Falls, New York

 Malden Bridge, New York.  

North Hoosick, New York.   Not too far from where we live.  This is one of the post offices that is slated for closure in the next round of down sizing.  I hear that it is the smallest post office (in physical size) that will be closing.  When I was taking the picture, someone told me that lots of people photograph this building.  That's good.  Everyone should take a picture of their post office so that when it is no longer there they will have a record of their old friend.

So we were driving along the Tamimami Trail through the everglades about an hour before sundown on our way to Punta Gorda and enjoying the vast emptiness of grass and sky that is the everglades when out of nowhere we saw it, what turned out to be the smallest post office in the United States in an area called Ochopee, Florida.  When you're not looking for anything, there it is.

Acadia, Florida

Lake Wales, Florida

Mussina, Iowa

Riverton, Nebraska

Rushville, Nebraska

Laurel, Long Island, New York

As if I needed a reminder of the way in which the post office holds together the fragile social fiber of our slowly disintegrating sense of connectedness amidst the "miracle" of this electronic age where communication has been reduced to a disembodied tweet of 29 words or less, while I was taking this photo in Laurel, I talked with 3 or 4 people who were curious about my photographic interest in some as "mundane" as their post office, found out something about them and their families, and spread the gospel of the messianic, overarching value of something they take for granted but shouldn't.  Take a picture of your friend and companion, your US post office so you will remember it when the fascists come wrapped in their flags an close down your last contact with the outside world.  To the left is Jackie, mailing a letter.

Almena, Kansas

Duncan, Nebraska

To the right of the picture is the postmistress who was just coming out to lower the flag as I was lining up this picture at almost 4:00.  She waited patiently as I took the picture and wondered what I was doing.  I explained my mission to try to take as many pictures as I could of interesting post offices so that some day someone will remember them and wonder what America was like back then.  She seemed pleased and I like to think that she saw her little outpost of the US government with new eyes.

Treynor, Iowa

Loretto, Kentucky

French Lick, Indiana, hometown of Larry Bird, and proud of it!!!

Spring Gap, Maryland

Bassett, Nebraska

Death Valley, California

Keeler, California,  a desolate, isolated town on a dried up lake bed on the west side of Death Valley.  For all intents and purposes something of a ghost town,  a relic from another era, but still meritorious enough to have its own post office.

Long Island, Kansas

We come from Long Island, NY so it was beholden on us to go out of out way to check out Long Island, Kansas.  It was overcast and there was not much there to see.  Furthermore, it is in the middle of vast grain fields.  Not an island at all.  The only person I saw in town was a woman crossing the street with a young child.  I stopped her to ask a few questions, but wouldn't you know it, she didn't speak english.  Happens to me all the time.

Seaside, Florida

Faux, but fantastic.  A recently constructed monument to the majesty of the US Post Office.  Obviously designed by someone with the same reverence for the institution as I have.  Luckily it was not left up to some lowest bid non governmental contractor, or it would have looked like the nondescript structure inflicted on Anamoose, North Dakota

I was reading an article recently on some web page or other, I now wish I could remember which,  exposing the fact that the post office in not at all as bankrupt as the government would have us believe.  Its just that other government departments are allowed to take money from the post offices general account to fund other government operations, like our wars, and building post offices in Iraq as part of out effort to reconstruct that country we destroyed.  But it is obviously easier to demonize the postal system and and our hard working postal workers, than to take a good hard look of the dysfunctional  government of which it is a part.  A slight of hand to distract us from the hard truth.

I have often said that when historians will one day chronicle the downfall and demise of the American empire, they will begin the account with 9/11 (although it could easily begin earlier), and I am now beginning to realize that the history will end with the closure of the last post office in the United States, that most truly American of all of our institutions. 

                                                                              

                                                                         Pablo

Dunning, Nebraska

After leaving Broken Bow, we continued along Highway 2 for about 35 miles where we came upon the town of Dunning which was the last substantial place we encountered before turning north onto Highway 83 right before Thetford.   In retrospect, I am kind of regreting not seeing the route 2 thing to the end, but next time.  As far as I can remember,  the below street photos are taken on Jewett Ave. the once and present main street.  There are a little over 100 people living there.  What do they do and where do they shop why do the buildings look the way they do?   An old photo on the Dunning web site indicates that the space between the bank and the red building was once the Wilson Hotel.  Accompanying the photo is a pretty good history of the hotel by Larry Wilson, grandson of the man who built it and was involved in the establishment to the bank next door around 1918.  Interesting that Larry does not mention what happened to the hotel.  Maybe next time I am out that way I can ask.

As I said, Dunning was the last town we stopped at on highway 2 before turning onto highway 83 which cuts right down the middle of the sand hills to route 20 where there were a few towns we wanted to see, particularly Cody, which was kind of the centerpiece of the 1978 National Geographic article about the sand hills.  So, onto highway 83 and up to Valentine and Route 20.  When you only have 10 or 11 days in Nebraska, which might seem like a lot to some people (its not) and an hour or two in any given place, you hope the sun is shining, in the right place in the sky, that the photography gods are on your side, and that you can do the best with what the circumstances provide.

                                                                                             

Pablo

Ding dong the witch is dead....

May 2, 2011

On schedule, we left Omaha on Sunday, May 1 and arrived in Lincoln a few hours later.  We were still in Lincoln on May 2 when the news broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed.  I'm not sure if I really cared or if I had any strong feelings about it one way or the other,  but just the same,  it happened.  They say that people always remember where they were when they first knew of important events.  In November of 1963, I was in the gym locker room, changing out of my gym clothes when some guy came in and said "Did you hear, JFK has been shot".  I can still see it in my minds eye as if it was yesterday.  Was sitting in a bar in Brussels watching the moon landing in 1969 with the rest of the world and feeling kind of smug.   For the World Trade Center disaster on 9/11/01, I was just beginning a group therapy session in the crisis unit of a state mental hospital I was working at, when my phone rang.  It was Jackie calling to tell me to turn on the TV,  because a plane had crashed into one of the buildings.  As I and many of the patients sat mesmorized by the image, the second plane hit the second building, and we all realized at that point that something more was going on.  When Barak Obama was elected president, we were watching the election results somewhere in Baja, Mexico.  I think we were in some little bar in La Paz.  Things get a little foggy as to the facts due to our alcohol consumption, and brains being fried by the heat.  One thing I do remember, is that there were alot of Americans in the bar that night and that all of them did not share the excitement many of us did over this momentous event.  I had an unsettling feeling over the negative energy going down there that night and remembered that scene in Rick's cafe in Casablanca where the German and French partisans and soldiers came close to battle singing their respective anthems.  We had no Rick to keep the peace, but thankfully, all ended quietly for us Americans that night in La Paz.

I'm not sure the killing of bin Laden was all that memorable for me,  in fact it was somewhat anti-climatic, occurring so many years after fact that it had lost its impact,  so I took these pictures so that I would remember who I was and where I was when this happened.

A few days after the fact, we were spending the night in Broken Bow where I saw this patriotic tribute to those involved in the killing.  I think many Midwesterners may take there matters more personally than we do back east, or maybe at least, those of us from NYC.

Addendum:
On August 6, 2011 a Chinnook helicopter carrying 20 + navy seals in addition too 11 other servicemen was shot down in Afganistan by a surface to air grenade.  A lucky shot some military commentator said. All 31 aboard were killed.  It was kind of ironic that these highly trained killing machines met their end in a tin can in the sky without firing a shot and without a chance in hell.  Kind of like those 30+  middle aged tourists who died in the bus crash on the way to Atlantic City because their driver fell asleep at the wheel.  You never know what will be but at least they were out there living on the edge and living their dream (the navy seals, that is).  Which makes this sign doubly meaningful.
                      
                                                                            Pablo

Seeing...

 In his book The Phenomenon of Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said "the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is something more to be seen".

Seeing is evolutionary.  It does not come all at once and sometimes it comes too late, but mostly it is the cumulative result of ongoing experience that will hopefully be woven into the fabric of an organizing principle the gives form, order and ultimately meaning to the visual field.  This was never more true for me than on my first trip through the southwest where I grappled hopelessly with the vast expanse of space and emptiness that was beautiful and hypnotic, but photographically uncomprehendible.  It was only when I came home and found, in the midst of many useless contact sheets, one sheet that had three photos in a row that I did not remember taking but surprised me with myself and my unswerving sense the symmetrical  a theme that has shown up throughout my work and asserted itself to impose the template necessary to organize my experiences in a meaningful manner,  and they are as follows:

I loved Arizona , New Mexico and Nevada, and these three photographs were motivation to return to the southwest on a number of occasions and resulted in a show entitled "Signs of Life in Death Valley and the American Southwest".  It was the human residue that provided the lynch pin that pulled it all together.  Here are a sampling of latter photos from the show inspired by the above.

I have come to realize that this has been true of me on my photographic journeys which I often begin with no sense of where I am or what I am looking at.  Sometimes I never see anything of what there was to see and sometimes the vision evolves so slowly that I am well along the way before it dawns on me what there was to see.   Unfortunately, by the time you you are able to see, you may have already missed alot, but what can you do?  If you are lucky and able, you can return mentally organized and ready to capture the vision.  I did in the southwest as the following pictures show, and now I am hoping to return to Nebraska, where this blog was supposed to begin, with a greater sense of what I want to do.

                                                                    Pablo