Blogging Rationale: The Abrams Archive

There are a few rules of blogging that have been proscribed during the recent history of the form. One of the cardinals is "avoid apologizing for blogging". This stems from the sullen voice inside our heads that shouts "nought is reading you and you're a pure egotist to spew your excretion into the interweb."

In contrast, I've had great confirmation of the power of blogging before but this instance combined subject, circumstance or context and result in a miraculous way and with extra juicy karma. I've been thinking about how to present it. I may be circumspect, because the experience is a work in progress.

It boils down to this; I have an old friend, who I love dearly and is truly rare among souls of women or men. I've written about Nancy Abrams several times on Rarenest. She is a journalist, photographer and spent a big chunk of her middle life living in small towns in West Virginia, which is contrasted by her early life as the daughter of charming, upward hoteliers in St. Louis.

To paraphrase an old Apalachian coloquial - she looks fabulous in evening wear at an art opening in Manhattan and she can piss in the woods. Or put chains on a Subaru. Or light a kerosene stove. Or make mouthwatering borscht, etc.

In her post grad years she participated in several photographic internships and fellowships - some as part of U.S. Government programs including DOCUMERICA. This was in the early part of her career which led to her settling near the Uptop Farm, which is where we met. She worked on small, microscopic newspapers in the hills and hollers. This is where we met twenty something years ago...

Here's where I put my thumbs under my arms: as a result of my blog entries and amazingly, while I was at the farm, a representative of the U.S. National Archive {National Records and Archives Administration (NARA)} emailed me to find Nancy. They have a group of her studies from the 70's. It seems they have been looking for her for awhile to develope a complete biography and to help contextualize her work.

It's at this point that the rationale for blogging becomes clear for me.

It's a great thing for a photographer to have any level of integration into the digital and literal documentary NARA empire. A casual search on the farm's locus parenti (nearest town - in this case - Terra Alta, West Virgina) only provides 4 photographs by one other, minor American documentarian: Walker Evans.

What the National Records and Archives Administration (NARA) doesn't realize is that what they possess now is a tiny fragment of a chip of a crystaline vision of three decades of rapidly shifting Allegheny culture because...get ready....

The unpublished Abrams Archive contains 30 to 50 thousand photographic negatives of everyday life, work, celebrations, society, landscapes and in small towns and valleys of northern West Virginia along the Appalachian Trail. Nancy has them in boxes.

I'm going to update this entry as things progress but I just wanted to get this down tonight. I'll provide more images and biographical text as they come along.

Nancy's life reads as the great American text. I am so glad she is starting, dawning toward some small recognition and integration. And this is only the beginning...She has always been a flourescent source of inspiration for the people around her.

Finally, the timing of this must have a personal and cosmic purpose. I'm as always filled with regret and longing when I leave the farm. I checked my email from a hotel room in Ohio on the endless highway home. For my first meaningful message to be so referential to the farm, such a positive message for someone I love and to be about images of a world I love, well it gives me hope in blogging.

Incidentally. most of the other blogging rules include apologizing too much.