Author: Anika Burgess / Source: Atlas Obscura
In May of 1982, Barry Gfeller left his home in Camus, Washington, got into his car, and began to drive.
His plan was similar to eight previous road trips he’d already taken, and 14 more he would embark on in the years to come: to photograph the streets and buildings of towns across the United States and Canada.
For nearly two decades, Gfeller would periodically hit the road to continue what became a mammoth photographic survey. In May 1982 alone, he photographed over 200 towns, traveling as far north as Edmonton and as far east as Milwaukee. When Gfeller died in 1999, his collection—which he arranged alphabetically, stored in long wooden boxes—consisted of 50,000 prints and negatives.“Ultimately, Gfeller drove over 100,000 miles across 44 states and six Canadian provinces between 1977 and 1996,” says Mike O’Neill, a political strategist who first learned about Gfeller in 2016. After Gfeller died, the collection made its way from his estate to a Canadian charity. Sixteen years later, the charity asked O’Neill to help find a buyer who could donate the work to a museum. They didn’t have to look far. Fascinated, O’Neill purchased the collection himself in 2017. He’s now begun to digitize the prints, and is searching for a long-term home for Gfeller’s archive.
In contrast to the volume of material he left behind, details about Gfeller himself are sparse. He was born in 1933, and lived his entire life in Camus, a town outside of Portland, Washington.
“He was a smart, shy young man who dropped out of college because he did not want to be around strangers and crowds,” says O’Neill. (What we do know about Gfeller is largely from a short biography by the photo historian Ken Appollo, written after Gfeller died). Gfeller worked in the local paper mill. As a child, he collected labels and packaging, and as an adult, he collected magazines and paperbacks. He was in his 40s when he began his photographic expeditions. “After a couple of weekend outings to nearby communities, he launched himself into two decades of epic,…The post The Mystery Man Who Spent 20 Years Photographing North American Buildings appeared first on FeedBox.