Sacramento, California. Irrigation canals.

This poster series began with a set of postcards that spanned the years 1900–1945, and covered locations across the country. I set out to build a story about places featured in the postcards, tying together several cards in a multi-year narrative, but eventually I created a much simpler story about an engineer whose professional travels took him to three sites around the country. The story itself takes the form of a memo about his work. The three settings became the focus for this poster series. Each poster represents one place, and one moment in the plot. The visual structure of each poster relates to the spatial organization of the corresponding location.

The three posters. (left to right) Sacramento, California; Augusta, Georgia.; and Washington, DC.

The series opens in Washington, DC, with its hierarchically-arranged avenues and monumental architecture. It moves to Augusta, Georgia, a textile mill town with broad tree-lined streets. Finally it continues on to Stockton, California, and the surrounding parts of the Central Valley,which depend on networks of irrigation canals for their water. The posters mix together several types of visual sources, including modern aerials, period postcards, and maps. They provide several points of view for each place.