I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m On My Way (or a Belated Welcome Back)

Hey Folks- If you’re here it’s probably because you remember my old site Square America which I ran from 2005-2011. I took down that site after I was hacked by a Russian porn site (really!) and I had planned a massive, quixotic redesign that would somehow string my entire collection together to tell a story (or least to say something) about American life in the 20th Century along with a second sequence that would say something about the nature of vernacular photography. Needless to say, I abandoned the project and just started posted random stuff on Facebook and later on Instagram.

With this site I’m not really looking to resurrect that project but I hope it’s a bit closer to what I had in mind then than I’m able to do on social media. I’ve been amassing photographs for over 20 years now I’m at a place where it feels somewhere between a collection and an archive (to me anyway! I’m sure real archivists might disagree) and I hope this site can be the best of both worlds; maintaining the surprise and idiosyncrasy you find in collections while still providing the utility of an archive once the entire collection is on-line. It’ll probably be a train wreck but hopefully an enjoyable one.

Speaking of hopefully enjoyable train wrecks, here’s a sequence of photos drawn completely from photos I added to my collection between Nov. 1st and 3rd. I got a bunch of photo in the mail (bought via eBay) and went to a Post Card show on the 2nd and a flea/antique market on the third where I bought lots (and I mean lots!) of photos. This sequence make use of about 1/3 of the photos I got- you can see it here.

How I Spent the War (or Memories of My Melancholy Whores)

WWII wasn’t all D-Day and Guadalcanal. These photos were taken from an album of a soldier who spent the war stationed in Venezuela and Antigua and he and his buddies seemed to have spent most of their time drinking and literally whoring around. I should note that I don’t know if all of these women were prostitutes but given the effect of the war on what was already a pretty bleak third-world economy (food shortages, inflation, etc…) you could hardly blame them if they were. See the full gallery here.