Wish you were here

Wish You Were Here is a photographic and epistolary project about memory, travel, and the small moments we carry home from the road. Built from years of travel, the project follows Emma and me through ghost towns, deserts, mountain lakes, roadside stops, historic places, and the landscapes we have encountered along the way.

These are our memories.

Each postcard preserves a moment from somewhere we have been: a place we stopped, something Emma noticed, something that made us laugh, or simply somewhere worth remembering. On the reverse, Emma writes to the viewer as she might write to a friend or family member back home. Her correspondence tells the smaller stories surrounding each photograph: what happened that day, what she thought about the place, what we were doing, or the ordinary details that eventually become inseparable from remembering a trip.

Wish You Were Here becomes both an invitation and a recurring sentiment throughout the work. Emma writes from wherever the road has taken us, sharing pieces of our travels with someone who wasn't there but whom she wishes could have been.

Visually, Wish You Were Here draws from vintage postcards and their relationship to travel, nostalgia, and physical memory. The finished pieces are intended to feel like objects that have lived alongside the memories they contain: mailed, handled, written upon, worn at the edges, saved in a drawer, and rediscovered years later. Their imperfections and apparent age give physical form to the way memories themselves change as we carry them with us.

Although Wish You Were Here exists within the same shared history as Letters to Emma and Letters to Anthony, it occupies a warmer and more playful part of that history. It is less concerned with absence than with presence: the places we have seen, the ridiculous moments we remember, the quiet ones we almost forgot, and the feeling of hearing from someone you love while they are somewhere out on the road.

The project continues as we do. Old journeys sit beside new ones without distinction. Lassen, Mt. Shasta, Castle Crags, the Sundial Bridge, Bodie, Alabama Hills, Manzanar, Mono Lake, June Lake, and wherever we happen to go next become pieces of the same continuing archive.

Wish You Were Here is ultimately a history of Emma and me told through the places we've been.

A record of the road.

A collection of memories.

And a little note home saying,

Wish you were here.