Or: Can someone’s thunder be stolen if it isn’t raining yet?
June 5, 2014: Not the only buildings in Struble, but close. Struble, pop. 78, is near the Plymouth/Sioux county line in northwestern Iowa.
I’ve been chugging along in my Iowa highway travels for more than a decade, and am nearly to my goal of traveling every state-maintained route. In a New Year’s resolution, I formalized a goal to visit every incorporated place in Iowa. I figured I’ll have more and better things to say when I got closer to or achieved those goals.
Then BOOM — someone from Keokuk puts up a Tumblr account with a goal to photograph not only every incorporated town, but the unincorporated ones as well — and he gets interviews with Vice magazine* and Kyle Munson. He’s soliciting money from the Internet to do this, something not on my radar for assorted reasons.
Cody Weber and I have different yet similar goals on how we want to photograph Iowa. My first focus has been on Iowa’s highways and their signs. That field, after a static period, is changing in different ways. When I’ve had time, or something caught my eye, I have expanded my range, especially picking up on school buildings and post offices across the state. But I am not as intent on photographing the towns in general. That could be because as a lifelong Iowan, I’m used to seeing sparse small-town downtowns. It could be because I am doing all this with a 10-year-old point-and-shoot camera. Mostly, I’m guessing it’s not spending as much time in any one place as a project like Weber’s requires.
As Weber has found out, engaging in a project that captures disappearing rural Iowa runs the risk of ruin porn. Of course, I am not above that at all — many school pictures fall under that category, as does the photo at the top of this entry. If something like this is going to be done, don’t let it be as a drop-into-flyover-country report — although Weber told Vice he plans on leaving Iowa when he can.
Unlike Weber, I would love for my legacy to be Iowa. If my highway pages, city highway histories, and school district timeline have benefited others, I am thrilled (with bibliographical acknowledgement as necessary). I have occasionally wondered what I can do with the photos I have taken — perhaps get a book published, like Dave and Barb Else did with schools, or Carson and Connie Ode did with their 99-county yearlong tour. I have already left little marks with my Des Moines Register columns about the Lincoln Highway and the closure of the Manilla school. The Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist took 7,000 photos of towns in six years, and I could augment that collection, eventually. I went across Iowa’s Lincoln Highway route in its centennial year, and that would be one category rich for visual storytelling.
I am the first to admit that my collection is esoteric. At the same time, though, I think it can be valuable precisely because it is esoteric. There is plenty of time to think about that legacy. For now, I am content to do what I can with what I have — but a dedicated webpage or two on this site probably wouldn’t hurt. (Not Tumblr. I can’t stand Tumblr’s structure.)
*Why Vice? Weber’s non-Forgotten-Iowa photographs have a Williamsburg vibe, and I’m not talking about the home of the Raiders.