“I have come to this lonely place and here is this other” – Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
In the last couple of years, the writer Brad Zellar and I have travelled to seven US States in the service of our self-published newspaper, The LBM Dispatch. Our first trip in May 2012 was to Ohio. A primary destination was Clyde, Ohio; the town on which Sherwood Anderson based his 1919 collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio.
The theme of Winesburg, Ohio is the individual’s struggle to deal with the loneliness created from small town life. The theme Brad and I were exploring was the loneliness of a culture increasingly lived behind screens. “We wanted to see how folks were faring outside the ersatz, isolating communities of office hives and cyberspace,” Brad wrote in the Ohio Dispatch.
While in Clyde, we spent the day at the Local 393 Moose Lodge. By the end of day, Brad had become a Moose. And by the end of that trip, Brad and I had become brothers. While this bond between Brad and I was never our explicit subject matter, I found myself repeatedly photographing traces of brotherhood on our journeys.
