{"id":6031,"date":"2015-04-20T10:16:58","date_gmt":"2015-04-20T15:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=6031"},"modified":"2015-04-20T01:22:31","modified_gmt":"2015-04-20T06:22:31","slug":"on-legacies-and-not-being-the-only-one-out-to-visit-every-iowa-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2015\/04\/on-legacies-and-not-being-the-only-one-out-to-visit-every-iowa-town\/","title":{"rendered":"On legacies, and not being the only one out to visit every Iowa town"},"content":{"rendered":"

Or: Can someone’s thunder be stolen if it isn’t raining yet?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"OLYMPUS
\nJune 5, 2014:<\/strong> Not the only buildings in Struble, but close. Struble, pop. 78, is near the Plymouth\/Sioux county line in northwestern Iowa.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a0a New Year’s resolution<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Then BOOM \u2014 someone from Keokuk puts up a Tumblr account<\/a>\u00a0with a goal to photograph not only every incorporated town, but the unincorporated ones as well \u2014 and he gets interviews with Vice magazine*<\/a>\u00a0and Kyle Munson<\/a>. He’s\u00a0soliciting money from the Internet<\/a>\u00a0to do this, something not on my radar for assorted reasons.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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.\u00a0That 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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 \u2014 although Weber told Vice he plans on leaving Iowa when he can.<\/p>\n

Unlike Weber, I would love for my legacy to be Iowa. If my highway pages, city highway histories, and\u00a0school district timeline<\/a> 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 \u2014 perhaps get a book published, like Dave and Barb Else\u00a0did with schools<\/a>,\u00a0or Carson and Connie Ode did with their 99-county yearlong tour<\/a>. I have already left little marks with my Des Moines Register<\/em> 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

I am the first to admit that my collection is esoteric. At the same time, though, I think it can be valuable precisely because<\/em> 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 \u2014 but a dedicated webpage or two on this site probably wouldn’t hurt. (Not Tumblr. I can’t stand Tumblr’s structure.)<\/p>\n

*Why Vice? Weber’s non-Forgotten-Iowa photographs have a Williamsburg vibe, and I’m not talking about the home of the Raiders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[18,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iowa-miscellaneous","category-maps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6031"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6037,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6031\/revisions\/6037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}