Square America
 Everybody seems to have a shoe box or two full of family snapshots. But Nicholas Osborn has about 100,000 photos in his apartment. And they're not even of his own relatives. For the past decade, Nick has collected vintage photos from flea markets and eBay, and he shares around 4,000 of his pre-1980s snaps on his web site, Square America, which we reviewed in 2005.
"I really wanted to collect fine art photography," Nick admits, "but couldn't afford it so snapshots seemed like a cheap, fun alternative." And these photos soon charmed him in their own right:" I realized just how amazing some of the photographs I was finding were—totally different from but every bit as interesting as anything you'd see hanging in a gallery." The web site started simply as a way to organize this growing collection, especially as Nick saw themes developing. "I certainly never set out to collect photos of people sleeping," he notes, "but at some point I realized that I had over a hundred of them, and the site was a great excuse for me to get them all together in one place and assess what I have." Another common photo—so typical, he named the site after it—is the square format. These make up the central "show" on the site. "The show Square America is probably my favorite," Nick says, "though I have to admit at over 600 photos spread out over 40 pages it's kind of a sprawling mess, but then again the sheer size gives it (hopefully) a kind of novelistic quality." Probably the oddest pictures he's collected (though he admits that "after 10 years of digging through boxes of photos, nothing really shocks me anymore") is the series he calls The Faces. Nick describes this as a "series of slides of young women taken from the late '50s through the late '60s—often showing the same girl over the course of several years—that must be medical in nature but remains a mystery to me." The subjects of these photos have remained anonymous so far, but details about one of the photographers of Square America have turned up. "I did post a series of photos by a photographer from the suburbs of Chicago named Martin Johnson, and his grandson wound up seeing them on the site and contacted me," Nick explains. "He had wondered where all of his grandfather's slides had wound up and was happy to see they had found a good home. He was also able to give me some background info on his grandfather, which was really terrific." Nick keeps the flame alive for these otherwise forgotten photos. He has more photo shows in the works for the site and plans to tag everything so the site is searchable in the future. "I certainly don't envision ever running out of photos—my collection seems to be growing faster than the site can keep up with," he confesses. Let's hope the gems make it online so we can get another peek into the square world.
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