7 ms·

Night-time in America's small towns

83 points by eclipse31 10y ago

andyjohnson0 10y ago
Very atmospheric, and reminded me of this [1] from a few months ago. [1] Striking Portraits of Lonely Cars in 1970s New York http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/striking-portraits-of-lonely-cars-in-1970s-new-york http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/striking-portraits-of-l...
throwanem 10y ago
Regardless of your opinion on the subject matter, I can unreservedly recommend this piece as a sublime example of the photographer's art.
- rndmio 10y ago
  I disagree, the poor quality and bad HDR really detracted from the images for me, they were painful to look at.
  - Diederich 10y ago
    Totally honest question here: can you be very specific about what caused these photos to be painful for you to look at? I have no formal photographic training but I have always taken a lot of pictures, and I've been told that some of them are good. I do know what HDR is, gleaned from various hacker news posts over the years. What is painful about these photos, to you?
    - Isamu 10y ago
      It's funny, now it's called HDR (for high dynamic range) but really you are compressing the "dynamic range" to make details visible that otherwise would be washed out or too dark. This has been a regular part of photography from the darkroom days, manipulating the exposure time, masking parts to selectively reduce exposure, "burning in" other parts. Especially with BW photography. The sort of other-worldly crispness, details, and groomed highlights can be upsetting to some people. But it sets this type of photography apart from say, documentary images and instead tries for a kind of art. Not everybody is familiar with this sort of photography.
      - ska 10y ago
        The "high dynamic range" refers to the input range, not the output range, so it isn't a misnomer as you suggest. This also what separates it a bit from techniques like masking which don't change the underlying range available, but rather tweaking the exposure in an area. Dodging and burning are dark room techniques, which is a whole different kettle of fish. As you note though, people used to do similar things with exposure bracketing in analog days - it's just a lot easier with digital. Fundamentally you can get some pretty similar results with selective lighting. After all you are locally changing the effective represented photon density hitting your receptor, either way.
        Isamu 10y ago
        > it isn't a misnomer as you suggest Just saying HDR should refer to the process. The output photo, as you say, only has a normal dynamic range, compressed from the inputs.
        ska 10y ago
        meh; It's an informative name that absolutely does refer to the process, and gives you some information. Your preferred approach isn't objectively any better (all kinds of processes could result in higher dynamic range outputs, some of which are arguably "cheating"). So what we have is a reasonable choice between imperfect alternatives that are mostly equivalent - but that choice is made now and far better to get on with it than quibble about it.
  - Lio 10y ago
    I'm no HDR expert but these shots don't appear to have been made with the standard HDR technique of stacking exposures. I didn't see anything stating that he'd used HDR in the article text either. There's a couple of shots that look like they might been exposed for the night sky with soft flash used to light the foreground. e.g. the cars art installation and the desert tree. If they had been made using standard HDR techniques I would have expected the street lights not to have blown out quite so much. I could very well be wrong though, as I said, I have only a passing knowledge of HDR. If anyone knows for sure I'd love to hear about the techniques used.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Where you see HDR, I see carefully considered exposure parameters, skillful use of lighting - the article mentions that Freeman used his car headlights - and maybe a CPL. Can you point to something that might substantiate your statement here, or is it just that you're unused to seeing these sorts of effects produced without tricks like exposure stacking?
  - distances 10y ago
    I hate bad HDR as much as the next guy, but I don't think these fell into that bucket. Just long exposures and some additional lighting.
  - stephancoral 10y ago
    Love it that people downvote you for expressing your opinion. I agree that the choice for lighting and retouching absolutely detract from these images. If anything, they perfectly illustrate a serious problem happening in American discourse: taking the raw document that is small town America and then filtering it to fit whatever viewpoint you want to project. Dems used to project the veneer of unions, Reps promise jobs, neither truly cares to go below the surface. Also road trip photography journeys a la Stephen Shore and Timothy O'Sullivan are so overdone. It's like the liberal arts student rite of passage these days.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      For what it's worth, I didn't downvote your parent comment or your own, despite that I disagree strongly with both. I'd love to know where in this you find projection of a false reality. While I think you're not wrong in general, with regard to the use of non-urban America by both US political parties as a blank slate suitable for filling up with whatever claims they care to make on the basis of whatever largely confabulated situation they care to claim exists, I really don't see anything to suggest this photographer set out to make any kind of US partisan political point whatsoever; he seems [1] to be an Englishman who just really likes to take pictures at night, and who came to the US to do so in part because he has a hard time finding nights dark enough for his taste at home. While it'd be hardly without precedent for an Englishman to come to the United States in order to comment on our culture political and otherwise, I see nothing to suggest this particular Englishman has done so, and I would be interested to see any evidence to the contrary that I might perhaps have missed. That point aside, let's talk a little more about the way our political parties use the vast majority of the United States that isn't heavily urbanized. What makes it possible for such misuse to occur without meaningful challenge? Does it seem plausible that, were those to whom these parties market such claims better informed about the true way of things in places like where I grew up, it would be difficult, indeed perhaps impossible, for such claims to be effectively sold? To be abundantly clear, I don't suggest that Mr. Freeman has done such work in his 'USA at Night' series, or that it's reasonable to expect he do so. His work makes it abundantly clear that he seeks to create art, rather than to document, and I think he achieves his goal quite marvelously. Finally, to that point - I'm not here to tell you that your opinion of Freeman's work is in error. It's yours, and you're welcome to it. But I am curious to know a little more about where that opinion originates. Is it purely in the political and, I guess, vaguely hipsterism-related concerns you raise later in your comment? Or does it in some way have to do with the fashion in which these photographs were actually composed and produced? You speak of lighting and retouching, but to me the former seems subtly and tastefully done, and the latter done with so light a hand that it's not at all evident in the final result - as I said before, there's nothing here that couldn't be done with film, by someone with a similar degree of skill and craftsmanship. I can think of some other ways in which the same subjects might be as effectively photographed, but I have no idea whether that's anything like what you have in mind, and I'd be very interested to hear more from you about why it is that you find these particular photographs so distasteful. [1] http://danielfreemanphotography.co.uk/about/ http://danielfreemanphotography.co.uk/about/
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    HDR? Do you mean fill flash?
- nhebb 10y ago
  They remind me of screen caps from someone's Fallout 4 mod. They're nice to look at, but at the same time they do look over-manipulated and fake.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Or like Daniel Freeman really knows how to use a camera. Digital makes it easier, but there's nothing here that couldn't be done with film. Understanding how exposure parameters like shutter speed and aperture work, and what a careful selection of lens-mounted filters can do, goes a very long way. I'm only an interested amateur, not a professional photographer. But if you want to pick one of the photos from that article, I'll explain how it was created, to the best of my understanding, and how one might go about creating something similar without any need of multiple exposures or Photoshop trickery.
    - ska 10y ago
      You also need a number of lights to get some of those. But all of that is no less "trickery" than the photoshop and bracketing/HDR is - not that I would call any of it trickery. It's an aesthetic choice, and it's fine to disagree with that, also.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        Well, sure; I'm not suggesting otherwise. I'm also not trying to argue aesthetics in any direction, but rather to make the point that - however hard some may find it to imagine that such photographs can be achieved purely with a camera, a tripod, and a careful use of light - they absolutely can be, and there's not really anything here to suggest they were not. Perhaps "trickery" was a poor choice of words. Until very recently, I haven't really had much involvement or interest in photography since being taught the basics on a Nikkormat FTn in childhood; as a recent amateur armed with a low-mid-end DSLR and very little idea of what on Earth he's doing, I have to say that the modern photographic hobby, at least in its online exponents, seems in many quarters very much more concerned with hipsterism, gear fetishization, and tearing one another down, than with anything that seems more directly involved with actually taking pictures at all. While I have very little respect for this sort of attitude, I do try where possible to avoid needlessly antagonizing anyone and I suppose the possibility exists that I might at some point need to get along with one of these sorts of jackasses, and so I'm in the process of refining my vocabulary and fashion of speaking on the subject in order to meet that need should it arise. 'Trickery' is the sort of word I'm under the impression such a person would use in similar circumstance, and so it managed to slip out here as well. Such errors will cease as I get this rather unpleasant style more accurately dialed in.
eddyg 10y ago
Fantastic images. I wish each photo included the city and state where it was taken for context.
- digler999 10y ago
  Looks like Tonopah, Nevada for at least two of them: The garage photo: https://goo.gl/maps/kDAs2buEaaL2 https://goo.gl/maps/kDAs2buEaaL2 The car sticking out of the earth: https://goo.gl/maps/JuFdKETPtgw https://goo.gl/maps/JuFdKETPtgw http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/international-car-forest-of-the-last-church http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/international-car-forest-... Two more appear to be in Red Oak, Iowa. I googled for "red oak printing" that is visible in one of the photos, which led to coolbaugh lane on the map, which is also visible in another photo. https://goo.gl/maps/b8vnAwEndWz https://goo.gl/maps/b8vnAwEndWz
  - eddyg 10y ago
    Thanks for the sleuthing! A map of his 7000 mile trip[1] would definitely have been interesting, at least to me. [1] http://danielfreemanphotography.co.uk/introduction-usa-series-follow/ http://danielfreemanphotography.co.uk/introduction-usa-serie...
treve 10y ago
Having grown up in a country where nationalism kind of harks back to nazism, it's always weird for me to see all the flags everywhere. It's just not something I can get used to, even after all these years of seeing US flags everywhere.
- droopyEyelids 10y ago
  Having grown up in small town America, it's becoming weird for me to see these flags, too. They don't feel the same as they did when I was a kid, and there are more of them, and they're used in different contexts.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - brudgers 10y ago
    When the US sent troops into Afghanistan, what came out spontaneously were yellow ribbons which had become the default way of displaying 'support for the troops' during the First Gulf War. The yellow ribbon in and of itself did not signify a position on the policy which led to troops being deployed. However, by expressing the hope for a quick demobilization, its sentiment ran counter to the administration's policy.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 10y ago
  People have a really basic need to bond over shared characteristics. Throughout the world, countries are glued together based on ethnicity, religion, or language. E.g. Pakistan separated from India over religion, and Bangladesh separated from Pakistan over language. Americans' proclivity for displaying the flag is a way of expressing unity in a country that doesn't have a common ethnicity, religion, or language. Nationalism also facilitates integration in a country that has tons of immigration. My family is from Bangladesh, where group membership is determined by ethnicity. A white American could move to Bangladesh at a young age, speak the language fluently, marry into a Bangladeshi family, but he'd never be Bangladeshi. Here, you step off the plane, put that flag up in front of your house, and boom you're American.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
I live in a place like those. Its great photography, but the mundane subjects make it hard to get into. Trying to locate any of those, I settled on one with an unusual street sign - 'Coolbaugh St'. There are 2 in the US, both in Pennsylvania. Neither has that building along it! Strange
- digler999 10y ago
  It's in iowa https://goo.gl/maps/b8vnAwEndWz https://goo.gl/maps/b8vnAwEndWz
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Ok that's why its all so familiar! I'm in Iowa too; have driven by there many times.
vogt 10y ago
This was wonderful. I love small town America. I grew up in a town of about 3000 and currently live in one that is population 30k or so. Popular sentiment in a lot of tech circles would have you believe that these places are solely filled with backwards, racist people. That can be true, but often times isn't. Small town life in the US lies on a very big spectrum.
- pizzetta 10y ago
  The other belief is that these people live in lost provinces far from the all important metropolises and long for being able to move to a place with meaning-ignoring that most of existence that's how people lived in rural communities.
oftenwrong 10y ago
Many of those charming small town main streets like the ones in some of the photos, and the independently owned businesses along them, are in decline, if not already dead. Wal-mart and other big, chain businesses, often located down the highway, are getting all the business, so the small businesses in town cannot survive. Recently, I saw an incredible video about a main street in Mississippi that was basically dead, but has been resurrected on a fairly modest budget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kChc7PVQFwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kChc7PVQFwA
- empath75 10y ago
  Yeah I was going to say. All those quaint American towns that look like they came out of a time capsule are that way because they've been in decline since those buildings were built and nobody has invested money into new buildings or businesses.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
    ... or the locals realized that the buildings were beautiful as is and didn't change much. I know a number of towns around here that probably don't look much different than they did 50 years ago and they're thriving. One of the nice things about small towns is that there's usually available real estate to put up new buildings without tearing down the old ones.
- aclimatt 10y ago
  You're absolutely right. I recently took a road trip through the South, having never been before, and felt the overwhelming death of these small towns. Cities like Selma, Alabama once had vibrant downtowns, but now almost all of the buildings are boarded up and most people (and businesses) have moved to the suburbs, seemingly driven by Wal-Mart et al. I'm working on a piece like the OP's actually to show more of these forgotten small towns. I think there's a lot of opportunity still left for some of these historic, beautiful town centers, if only more people (especially from the coasts) knew about them.
  - brudgers 10y ago
drivingmenuts 10y ago
One thing that sticks out in my mind is how utterly empty small towns feel late at night. I grew up in a rural area but have lived in larger urban areas since going to college. Small towns seem like another world after midnight. The lighting is all wrong, there's no sound in your immediate area, there's no life. Unless it has a 24-hour convenience store, it might seem like the place is completely abandoned. During the day, there's people and life and things happening, but at night, you want to pull your jacket tighter and hunker down a bit, maybe.
- Sorry_Rum_Ham 10y ago
  Once, while on a road trip, the wife and I ended up walking around Roswell, New Mexico at 2:00AM on a Tuesday. The town was completely lifeless as you described. We didn't see a single person for hours. The dark, empty town coupled with the alien/UFO decor literally everywhere you looked is still one of the more surreal things I've experienced. I have sort of a warm nostalgia for it, though.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  Several times I've driven into the small town where I grew up at 4 AM. Aside from the odd semi or car on the major roads (even near the chain stores), it looks like it's abandoned; or maybe a huge empty basement with most of the lights broken.
- dwe3000 10y ago
  > Small towns seem like another world after midnight. ... there's no sound in your immediate area, there's no life. What I loved about growing up in a town with less than 300.
thecity2 10y ago
Where it's never gotten past 1955.
dcolgan 10y ago
I'm attempting to start do the whole solopreneur online make your own business passive income thing, and it hit me one day that I was spending a whole lot of money in expensive places to sit in front of my computer and type. So this year I moved back to smalltown Indiana. I have a relatively giant apartment above a storefront in one of these small town main streets. It is mostly quiet and costs a whole $360 a month. There is a coffee shop with 2 tables and a nice owner to talk to, and a couple of my friends work at the one webdev shop in town. I live two blocks away from a tiny little dance studio where I take dance lessons once a week, and am close enough to a city that I can drive there if I have to. Also the internet here is better than many large cities I've been to. My relatively small savings from freelance should last me way longer than it would have in Chicago where I was before. I kind of wonder if there is an opportunity here to start little startup colonies in small towns. Sure, it's no cultural center, but I've been pleasantly surprised at the friendliness of the people I've met here. The towns around this one certainly vary in quality of life, but if you look around you may find some cool places. The main street may not be able to support a grocery store with Walmart down the street, but it is supporting a custom bike shop, a funeral home, and several local insurance companies. Maybe one way to revitalize these small towns is to bring in tech jobs that can be done from anywhere. It's certainly working for me so far.

83 points by eclipse31 10y ago

Very atmospheric, and reminded me of this [1] from a few months ago. [1] Striking Portraits of Lonely Cars in 1970s New York http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/striking-portraits-of-lonely-cars-in-1970s-new-york http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/striking-portraits-of-l...

throwanem 10y ago

Regardless of your opinion on the subject matter, I can unreservedly recommend this piece as a sublime example of the photographer's art.

rndmio 10y ago
I disagree, the poor quality and bad HDR really detracted from the images for me, they were painful to look at.
- Diederich 10y ago
  Totally honest question here: can you be very specific about what caused these photos to be painful for you to look at? I have no formal photographic training but I have always taken a lot of pictures, and I've been told that some of them are good. I do know what HDR is, gleaned from various hacker news posts over the years. What is painful about these photos, to you?
  - Isamu 10y ago
    It's funny, now it's called HDR (for high dynamic range) but really you are compressing the "dynamic range" to make details visible that otherwise would be washed out or too dark. This has been a regular part of photography from the darkroom days, manipulating the exposure time, masking parts to selectively reduce exposure, "burning in" other parts. Especially with BW photography. The sort of other-worldly crispness, details, and groomed highlights can be upsetting to some people. But it sets this type of photography apart from say, documentary images and instead tries for a kind of art. Not everybody is familiar with this sort of photography.
    - ska 10y ago
      The "high dynamic range" refers to the input range, not the output range, so it isn't a misnomer as you suggest. This also what separates it a bit from techniques like masking which don't change the underlying range available, but rather tweaking the exposure in an area. Dodging and burning are dark room techniques, which is a whole different kettle of fish. As you note though, people used to do similar things with exposure bracketing in analog days - it's just a lot easier with digital. Fundamentally you can get some pretty similar results with selective lighting. After all you are locally changing the effective represented photon density hitting your receptor, either way.
      - Isamu 10y ago
        > it isn't a misnomer as you suggest Just saying HDR should refer to the process. The output photo, as you say, only has a normal dynamic range, compressed from the inputs.
        ska 10y ago
        meh; It's an informative name that absolutely does refer to the process, and gives you some information. Your preferred approach isn't objectively any better (all kinds of processes could result in higher dynamic range outputs, some of which are arguably "cheating"). So what we have is a reasonable choice between imperfect alternatives that are mostly equivalent - but that choice is made now and far better to get on with it than quibble about it.
- Lio 10y ago
  I'm no HDR expert but these shots don't appear to have been made with the standard HDR technique of stacking exposures. I didn't see anything stating that he'd used HDR in the article text either. There's a couple of shots that look like they might been exposed for the night sky with soft flash used to light the foreground. e.g. the cars art installation and the desert tree. If they had been made using standard HDR techniques I would have expected the street lights not to have blown out quite so much. I could very well be wrong though, as I said, I have only a passing knowledge of HDR. If anyone knows for sure I'd love to hear about the techniques used.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Where you see HDR, I see carefully considered exposure parameters, skillful use of lighting - the article mentions that Freeman used his car headlights - and maybe a CPL. Can you point to something that might substantiate your statement here, or is it just that you're unused to seeing these sorts of effects produced without tricks like exposure stacking?
- distances 10y ago
  I hate bad HDR as much as the next guy, but I don't think these fell into that bucket. Just long exposures and some additional lighting.
- stephancoral 10y ago
  Love it that people downvote you for expressing your opinion. I agree that the choice for lighting and retouching absolutely detract from these images. If anything, they perfectly illustrate a serious problem happening in American discourse: taking the raw document that is small town America and then filtering it to fit whatever viewpoint you want to project. Dems used to project the veneer of unions, Reps promise jobs, neither truly cares to go below the surface. Also road trip photography journeys a la Stephen Shore and Timothy O'Sullivan are so overdone. It's like the liberal arts student rite of passage these days.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    For what it's worth, I didn't downvote your parent comment or your own, despite that I disagree strongly with both. I'd love to know where in this you find projection of a false reality. While I think you're not wrong in general, with regard to the use of non-urban America by both US political parties as a blank slate suitable for filling up with whatever claims they care to make on the basis of whatever largely confabulated situation they care to claim exists, I really don't see anything to suggest this photographer set out to make any kind of US partisan political point whatsoever; he seems [1] to be an Englishman who just really likes to take pictures at night, and who came to the US to do so in part because he has a hard time finding nights dark enough for his taste at home. While it'd be hardly without precedent for an Englishman to come to the United States in order to comment on our culture political and otherwise, I see nothing to suggest this particular Englishman has done so, and I would be interested to see any evidence to the contrary that I might perhaps have missed. That point aside, let's talk a little more about the way our political parties use the vast majority of the United States that isn't heavily urbanized. What makes it possible for such misuse to occur without meaningful challenge? Does it seem plausible that, were those to whom these parties market such claims better informed about the true way of things in places like where I grew up, it would be difficult, indeed perhaps impossible, for such claims to be effectively sold? To be abundantly clear, I don't suggest that Mr. Freeman has done such work in his 'USA at Night' series, or that it's reasonable to expect he do so. His work makes it abundantly clear that he seeks to create art, rather than to document, and I think he achieves his goal quite marvelously. Finally, to that point - I'm not here to tell you that your opinion of Freeman's work is in error. It's yours, and you're welcome to it. But I am curious to know a little more about where that opinion originates. Is it purely in the political and, I guess, vaguely hipsterism-related concerns you raise later in your comment? Or does it in some way have to do with the fashion in which these photographs were actually composed and produced? You speak of lighting and retouching, but to me the former seems subtly and tastefully done, and the latter done with so light a hand that it's not at all evident in the final result - as I said before, there's nothing here that couldn't be done with film, by someone with a similar degree of skill and craftsmanship. I can think of some other ways in which the same subjects might be as effectively photographed, but I have no idea whether that's anything like what you have in mind, and I'd be very interested to hear more from you about why it is that you find these particular photographs so distasteful. [1] http://danielfreemanphotography.co.uk/about/ http://danielfreemanphotography.co.uk/about/
- CalRobert 10y ago
  HDR? Do you mean fill flash?
nhebb 10y ago
They remind me of screen caps from someone's Fallout 4 mod. They're nice to look at, but at the same time they do look over-manipulated and fake.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Or like Daniel Freeman really knows how to use a camera. Digital makes it easier, but there's nothing here that couldn't be done with film. Understanding how exposure parameters like shutter speed and aperture work, and what a careful selection of lens-mounted filters can do, goes a very long way. I'm only an interested amateur, not a professional photographer. But if you want to pick one of the photos from that article, I'll explain how it was created, to the best of my understanding, and how one might go about creating something similar without any need of multiple exposures or Photoshop trickery.
  - ska 10y ago
    You also need a number of lights to get some of those. But all of that is no less "trickery" than the photoshop and bracketing/HDR is - not that I would call any of it trickery. It's an aesthetic choice, and it's fine to disagree with that, also.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Well, sure; I'm not suggesting otherwise. I'm also not trying to argue aesthetics in any direction, but rather to make the point that - however hard some may find it to imagine that such photographs can be achieved purely with a camera, a tripod, and a careful use of light - they absolutely can be, and there's not really anything here to suggest they were not. Perhaps "trickery" was a poor choice of words. Until very recently, I haven't really had much involvement or interest in photography since being taught the basics on a Nikkormat FTn in childhood; as a recent amateur armed with a low-mid-end DSLR and very little idea of what on Earth he's doing, I have to say that the modern photographic hobby, at least in its online exponents, seems in many quarters very much more concerned with hipsterism, gear fetishization, and tearing one another down, than with anything that seems more directly involved with actually taking pictures at all. While I have very little respect for this sort of attitude, I do try where possible to avoid needlessly antagonizing anyone and I suppose the possibility exists that I might at some point need to get along with one of these sorts of jackasses, and so I'm in the process of refining my vocabulary and fashion of speaking on the subject in order to meet that need should it arise. 'Trickery' is the sort of word I'm under the impression such a person would use in similar circumstance, and so it managed to slip out here as well. Such errors will cease as I get this rather unpleasant style more accurately dialed in.

eddyg 10y ago

Fantastic images. I wish each photo included the city and state where it was taken for context.

digler999 10y ago
Looks like Tonopah, Nevada for at least two of them: The garage photo: https://goo.gl/maps/kDAs2buEaaL2 https://goo.gl/maps/kDAs2buEaaL2 The car sticking out of the earth: https://goo.gl/maps/JuFdKETPtgw https://goo.gl/maps/JuFdKETPtgw http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/international-car-forest-of-the-last-church http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/international-car-forest-... Two more appear to be in Red Oak, Iowa. I googled for "red oak printing" that is visible in one of the photos, which led to coolbaugh lane on the map, which is also visible in another photo. https://goo.gl/maps/b8vnAwEndWz https://goo.gl/maps/b8vnAwEndWz
- eddyg 10y ago
  Thanks for the sleuthing! A map of his 7000 mile trip[1] would definitely have been interesting, at least to me. [1] http://danielfreemanphotography.co.uk/introduction-usa-series-follow/ http://danielfreemanphotography.co.uk/introduction-usa-serie...

treve 10y ago

Having grown up in a country where nationalism kind of harks back to nazism, it's always weird for me to see all the flags everywhere. It's just not something I can get used to, even after all these years of seeing US flags everywhere.

droopyEyelids 10y ago
Having grown up in small town America, it's becoming weird for me to see these flags, too. They don't feel the same as they did when I was a kid, and there are more of them, and they're used in different contexts.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- brudgers 10y ago
  When the US sent troops into Afghanistan, what came out spontaneously were yellow ribbons which had become the default way of displaying 'support for the troops' during the First Gulf War. The yellow ribbon in and of itself did not signify a position on the policy which led to troops being deployed. However, by expressing the hope for a quick demobilization, its sentiment ran counter to the administration's policy.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 10y ago
People have a really basic need to bond over shared characteristics. Throughout the world, countries are glued together based on ethnicity, religion, or language. E.g. Pakistan separated from India over religion, and Bangladesh separated from Pakistan over language. Americans' proclivity for displaying the flag is a way of expressing unity in a country that doesn't have a common ethnicity, religion, or language. Nationalism also facilitates integration in a country that has tons of immigration. My family is from Bangladesh, where group membership is determined by ethnicity. A white American could move to Bangladesh at a young age, speak the language fluently, marry into a Bangladeshi family, but he'd never be Bangladeshi. Here, you step off the plane, put that flag up in front of your house, and boom you're American.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

I live in a place like those. Its great photography, but the mundane subjects make it hard to get into. Trying to locate any of those, I settled on one with an unusual street sign - 'Coolbaugh St'. There are 2 in the US, both in Pennsylvania. Neither has that building along it! Strange

digler999 10y ago
It's in iowa https://goo.gl/maps/b8vnAwEndWz https://goo.gl/maps/b8vnAwEndWz
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Ok that's why its all so familiar! I'm in Iowa too; have driven by there many times.

vogt 10y ago

This was wonderful. I love small town America. I grew up in a town of about 3000 and currently live in one that is population 30k or so. Popular sentiment in a lot of tech circles would have you believe that these places are solely filled with backwards, racist people. That can be true, but often times isn't. Small town life in the US lies on a very big spectrum.

pizzetta 10y ago
The other belief is that these people live in lost provinces far from the all important metropolises and long for being able to move to a place with meaning-ignoring that most of existence that's how people lived in rural communities.

oftenwrong 10y ago

Many of those charming small town main streets like the ones in some of the photos, and the independently owned businesses along them, are in decline, if not already dead. Wal-mart and other big, chain businesses, often located down the highway, are getting all the business, so the small businesses in town cannot survive. Recently, I saw an incredible video about a main street in Mississippi that was basically dead, but has been resurrected on a fairly modest budget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kChc7PVQFwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kChc7PVQFwA

empath75 10y ago
Yeah I was going to say. All those quaint American towns that look like they came out of a time capsule are that way because they've been in decline since those buildings were built and nobody has invested money into new buildings or businesses.
- HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
  ... or the locals realized that the buildings were beautiful as is and didn't change much. I know a number of towns around here that probably don't look much different than they did 50 years ago and they're thriving. One of the nice things about small towns is that there's usually available real estate to put up new buildings without tearing down the old ones.
aclimatt 10y ago
You're absolutely right. I recently took a road trip through the South, having never been before, and felt the overwhelming death of these small towns. Cities like Selma, Alabama once had vibrant downtowns, but now almost all of the buildings are boarded up and most people (and businesses) have moved to the suburbs, seemingly driven by Wal-Mart et al. I'm working on a piece like the OP's actually to show more of these forgotten small towns. I think there's a lot of opportunity still left for some of these historic, beautiful town centers, if only more people (especially from the coasts) knew about them.
- brudgers 10y ago

drivingmenuts 10y ago

One thing that sticks out in my mind is how utterly empty small towns feel late at night. I grew up in a rural area but have lived in larger urban areas since going to college. Small towns seem like another world after midnight. The lighting is all wrong, there's no sound in your immediate area, there's no life. Unless it has a 24-hour convenience store, it might seem like the place is completely abandoned. During the day, there's people and life and things happening, but at night, you want to pull your jacket tighter and hunker down a bit, maybe.

Sorry_Rum_Ham 10y ago
Once, while on a road trip, the wife and I ended up walking around Roswell, New Mexico at 2:00AM on a Tuesday. The town was completely lifeless as you described. We didn't see a single person for hours. The dark, empty town coupled with the alien/UFO decor literally everywhere you looked is still one of the more surreal things I've experienced. I have sort of a warm nostalgia for it, though.
theandrewbailey 10y ago
Several times I've driven into the small town where I grew up at 4 AM. Aside from the odd semi or car on the major roads (even near the chain stores), it looks like it's abandoned; or maybe a huge empty basement with most of the lights broken.
dwe3000 10y ago
> Small towns seem like another world after midnight. ... there's no sound in your immediate area, there's no life. What I loved about growing up in a town with less than 300.

thecity2 10y ago

Where it's never gotten past 1955.

dcolgan 10y ago

I'm attempting to start do the whole solopreneur online make your own business passive income thing, and it hit me one day that I was spending a whole lot of money in expensive places to sit in front of my computer and type. So this year I moved back to smalltown Indiana. I have a relatively giant apartment above a storefront in one of these small town main streets. It is mostly quiet and costs a whole $360 a month. There is a coffee shop with 2 tables and a nice owner to talk to, and a couple of my friends work at the one webdev shop in town. I live two blocks away from a tiny little dance studio where I take dance lessons once a week, and am close enough to a city that I can drive there if I have to. Also the internet here is better than many large cities I've been to. My relatively small savings from freelance should last me way longer than it would have in Chicago where I was before. I kind of wonder if there is an opportunity here to start little startup colonies in small towns. Sure, it's no cultural center, but I've been pleasantly surprised at the friendliness of the people I've met here. The towns around this one certainly vary in quality of life, but if you look around you may find some cool places. The main street may not be able to support a grocery store with Walmart down the street, but it is supporting a custom bike shop, a funeral home, and several local insurance companies. Maybe one way to revitalize these small towns is to bring in tech jobs that can be done from anywhere. It's certainly working for me so far.