21 March 09

Remembering Dorothea Lange

The Urban Sketchbook project is an important chronicle of a moment in our world’s history, I think. Partly because of its global scope — draw a sketch on the Tokyo Metro, in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, or in Central Park, scan it and upload it and everyone in the world can see it.

A sketch from earlier this week bidding farewell to the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (and the coming rush of more, including two major newspapers in Northern California) has got me thinking about earlier chroniclers of desperate times. I don’t think these scans of sketchbooks will endure beyond a decade or two, but the sketchbooks might. (The Archdruid made a powerful case this week for the endurance of one kind of technology: books.)

I am thinking about making a sketchbook (or several) for the sole purpose of chronicling the slide from prosperity (chimerical though it may always have been) to want. Sketching iPhones and then discarded circuit-boards. Rusting cars. Foreclosure signs and boarded-up shop windows, of which we have no shortage now in Davis, where the recession is otherwise fairly invisible (becoming less so daily). But it will also chronicle, I hope, people learning to make it through this by helping each other, learning simpler ways of doing things. Since everywhere I go I have a sketchbook with me, and since everywhere I go there are infinite things to sketch that tell this story, I don’t imagine being at a loss much.

It’s the invisibility becoming less so daily part I’d like to start following. Since I am no good with a camera I myself will do this with a sketchbook, but I invite you to join me with whatever medium you’d like — words, camera, pen, pastels, clay, video. I’m not volunteering to put these together on a website, but if you’d like to do that, let me know. I think at the very least we could offer this as a qarrtsiluni topic for consideration…

Posted by at 08:41 AM in Design Arts | Link |
  1. Mmm… a great project. I feel a bit out of the running for it, though, because our city is already so depressed – I have tons of pictures of buildings decaying aesthetically already – that I’m hard-pressed to envision what distinctions I’d be noticing.

    It isn’t even that this city is a forerunner of what’s to come – it’s more an example of a community that didn’t even have enough to take advantage of the boom.


    Rana    21. March 2009, 13:40    Link
  2. Rana — I agree, and was wondering as I wrote this about Moore’s Roger & Me, which already tackled a decaying industrial heartland.

    Maybe what I’m interested in is the decay of the white-collar dream? I’m not sure. Certainly California or at least this part of it has a different experience — until very recently people were still flocking to move here. Still pondering.


    Pica    21. March 2009, 20:11    Link
  3. I imagine that the changes in Southern California are especially vivid – there was such rapid growth there, and such ridiculous housing prices – and all for stucco blandness with an hourlong commute. The area around Temecula, I’ve heard, is especially grim.


    Rana    22. March 2009, 10:25    Link

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