Rural Archive
A Brief Introduction
Since the Spring of 2016, Rural Archive has collected thousands of rural newspaper photographs alongside representations of these same regions in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Across those differences in place, culture, and editorial context, the Archive documents the swift, and often contradictory, forms of change in rural communities – and how these dynamics are misunderstood in the urban-normative national conversation.
Rural Archive is freely offered as a foundation for research, education, and creative projects.
The Archive has been featured on Minnesota Public Television and included, as a video installation and newprint publication, within the Field Notes exhibition of artists from rural America and Indian Country at Form + Content Gallery in Minneapolis.
This work is curated by Matthew Fluharty. He is a member of M12 Studio, Executive Director of Art of the Rural, and an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow. Matthew is from a multi-generational farming family in Appalachian Ohio, and he currently lives in Winona, Minnesota, a town located along the Mississippi River in Dakota homelands.
Further Information
How did this begin?
In the spring of 2016, I began to more intentionally reflect on my everyday life. Time was flowing differently, and I felt compelled to try to document some of it, while also letting some of it go.
On Kawara’s work is deeply important to me, and I returned to his art in this moment. Sitting with his Today and I Read series eventually led me towards a reciprocal form of visual art that documented rural experience in a serial way: the vernacular photography of the real-photo postcard. Lucy Sante’s Folk Photography was a key aperture towards those connections.
At the time, I was writing about how the realities of non-urban places and cultures were changing more quickly than any of us (rural, urban, etc) could grasp, albeit for different reasons. The rural newspaper photograph became a talisman for me of this change – but also for its intense fragility. Like the real photo postcard, many of these printed images may no longer exist in any physical form beyond a few months after their publication. I felt compelled to preserve some of these photographs.
My family’s multi-generational history of rural journalism, and the challenges facing rural newspapers, all converge here. This was a daily practice that felt personal, intimate, but also threaded to currents that extended beyond my kitchen table. In the midst of all of this, I was deepening in path towards becoming a Novice Priest in the Zen Garland Order, a community that is a part of what’s known as the Socially Engaged Buddhist movement. Gathering these photographs became part of that practice too.
When did this become “Rural Archive?”
I love sitting down with a local newspaper, reading its writers, and experiencing how these editors have chosen to visually represent their community. I feel real gratitude for the hard work and sacrifice that these newsrooms put into this creative product – despite the economic uncertainty of local journalism.
I've also seen firsthand how a declining newspaper can signal a subsequent decline in civic participation and community well-being. The rural newspaper is a living, physical metaphor for a local culture, in all its celebrations, disagreements, and aspirations. It is a fragile and beautiful thing.
This practice became Rural Archive after the 2016 election changed the perceptions of the relationship between urban and rural. Out of the shock of that moment for many in the media industry, particularly The New York Times, came a different visual metaphor: Trump Country. While this visual trope has evolved in the years since, it still persists and it signifies an urban-normative narrative that runs against the grain of the complexities of lived, rural, experience.
The gap between these visual metaphors is the generative space of Rural Archive, and it refracts different kinds of understanding back at both the NYT, WSJ, and these local publications. Local Archive is neither a condemnation of urban journalism nor a nostalgic defense of rural newspapers. It's a look at a chasm that has gained definition as the years have progressed from Trump to the pandemic, from mask mandates to the metaverse.
Where do you get all these newspapers?
Each morning, copies of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are delivered to my home, followed by additional newspapers from across the country that arrive via USPS in the afternoons. For the most part, these are weekly publications. I alternate these subscriptions once a year.
Friends and family also save newspapers for me. In addition, my work with Art of the Rural and M12 Studio takes me across rural and Indian Country; I’ve always stopped at gas stations to pick up the local papers, but as Rural Archive emerged this practice became more focused.
How are they archived?
Photographs are cut from the newspaper alongside the headline, caption, and photo credit. In cases where copy is located immediately above, the closest three lines of text are also included.
These images are affixed to 8’ x 11” card stock with a single piece of Scotch Tape, and stored in archival document cases. Beyond the tape, these products are acid and lignin-free.
What does it all mean?
“It isn’t the wind that’s moving, and it isn’t the flag. It’s your mind that’s moving.”
-- The Sixth Patriarch, The Platform Sutra
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