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…