Postcards From America

Instagram: @PostcardsFromAmerica

From left to right: @mikhael_subotzky, @sohrabhura, @gideonsbyebull, @littlebrownmushroom, #ChrisKlatell, @goldbergjim 

(Cairo, Illinois)

Jim Goldberg.  Patricia and Darrell, 1988 and 2015.  Portland, Oregon.  

Postcards, Portland.

For the last few weeks we’ve been in the great Northwest.  Tomorrow evening (Friday, May 29) from 4:30-6:00 pm get a first look when Donovan Wylie, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, Bieke Depoorter, Peter van Agtmael and Jim Goldberg speak at the Portland Art Museum as part of the citywide Assembly conference. 

Martin Parr.  Churchill Downs.  Louisville, Kentucky.

David Alan Harvey.  Louisville, Kentucky.  

"I survived the Vietnam War without getting shot. I was a medic. So I come back home to Louisville and some punk kid shoots me in the back," says Richard, whose wife Bonnie shows me where the bullet entered.  Ironically, Richard is the subject of one of John Olson’s most famous Vietnam War photos for Life Magazine, in which Richard tends to a dying soldier during the Tet Offensive.

Martin Parr.  Churchill Downs.  Louisville, Kentucky.

David Alan Harvey.  Renee feeling the spirit, First Friend Ministry, Louisville, Kentucky.  The Pentecostal church has no building and meets in a basement conference room at a hotel by the airport.  Said the pastor: “You gotta let the roots of your tree go deep when times are hard.”  

Martin Parr.  Churchill Downs.  Louisville, Kentucky.  

Peter van Agtmael, Derby Outskirts, Louisville, KY

Peter van Agtmael, Derby Aftermath, Louisville, KY.

Peter van Agtmael, Kentucky Derby outskirts, Louisville, KY.

Peter van Agtmael, Kentucky Derby, Louisvilly, KY.

Mark Power.  The Inland Empire.  Muskoy, California.  

We’re excited to be in the homestretch of Postcards, but a sad corollary is that we need to start saying goodbye to people, starting with Mark Power.  

Mark’s contributions to Postcards far outweigh the three trips on which he photographed (Florida, Milwaukee and Inland Empire).  His enormous frames seemed to find a natural home in the American landscape, and they proceeded to carve it up:  Mark lost none of his usual poetic quality, but America also made him political.  His panoramas became a searing investigation of American land economies, in a country where land and its occupation have long stood proxy for a complicated mixture of other values: Aspiration, power, “freedom”.  

There are a variety of photographic antecedents to Postcards, but from the beginning there’s also been a painterly one:  Our first trip through the Southwest already contained an echo of Hartley, Dove, Marin and O’Keefe. Mark stands very much in that painterly tradition, which extends forward through the likes of Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford.

Mark has finished has last Postcards trip, but he’s by no means done photographing in America. We can’t wait to see what’s next. 

Thanks, Mark.    

Alessandra Sanguinetti.  Sofia and Sonia Maldonado.  

In addition to our friends at Cal Sunday, we were lucky to have a great team of partners on Inland Empire, including the photo departments at CSU Fullerton, CSU Long Beach and CSU San Bernardino.  We couldn't have pulled this off without our terrific assistants:  Candace Wakefield, Marisela Kristel Gonzalez, Yunuen Bonaparte, Sean Black, Daniel Madden, and Frederick J. Brashear Jr.; professors Chelsea Mosher, Kyle Riedel, Xtine Burrough, and Sant Khalsa; and our terrific field producers Jenna Pirog and Caitlin Lennon.  Our enormous thanks to all of them.      

Jim Goldberg.  A.F.  Redlands, California.

We’re really pleased to be collaborating with The California Sunday Magazine on the Inland Empire chapter of Postcards.  Magazines play an important role in encouraging photographers – and especially non-journalistic photographers – to keep going out into the world, and we’re really happy to see a new, ambitious one emerge on the West Coast.  California Sunday has already run features with our friends the late Larry Sultan and Richard Misrach, so the bar’s been set nice and high. Our Inland Empire story will appear in the May issue, which is now online, and comes out in print this Sunday in the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, and San Diego Union Tribune.

Moises Saman.  Cameron on the wheel of Justin’s truck in the CVS parking lot.  Redlands, California.

Congratulations to Moises Saman and Susan Meiselas, who each received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, joining 2013 recipients Alec Soth and Bruce Gilden.  Jason Fulford, who designed Swap Shop magazine from Postcards Florida, won in 2014.