postmistress (2023) (Patreon)

I know most people don't really have any reason to be in Nevada City, Montana, a town an hour off of the stretch of I-15 between Butte and Rexburg, but I will say, it was really well-preserved. They had like thirty buildings, mostly at least standing or close enough to it that it felt less "ghost town" and more "historical village", which is fairly unusual when you're dealing with boom-and-bust mining villages from the 1860s. 

It was large and well-kept enough that I decided to shoot in both outfits I had brought with me to choose from; that means that last night, I got two more "vignettes" into the ongoing photobook project and it hit 40 pages (and a theoretical range of 1860-1900-ish), which does beg the question: now what? 

The goal was to do a bunch more shoots through the 1900s era, and they are feasible (40's at a couple of aviation museums I think I know people at, 60's is definitely easily doable in Seattle, I can probably figure out the 80's without too much difficulty) but that also means that now it will be yet another project sitting unfinished on my hard drive while I wait to travel to get the rest of it shot, which is somewhat frustrating. Even more frustrating is that now I think I may actually need to get clothes for this, instead of just using what I had.

I know that, largely, as I develop and strive to shoot better collections of work, they're all just going to be like this, but also, this was originally supposed to be a pdf I was going to slap on itch.io for like $4. It does make me wonder if I would find more joy or at least more satisfaction in my work if I would stop benchmarking, say, Cindy Sherman, and instead just took a few little photo projects here and there.