Weymouths

Weymouths is a project about two places named Weymouth, one in England and one in Massachusetts. The two Weymouths are connected in time, and in space, by a dotted line drawn in 1635. This is the dotted line that I started with last year, when I was commissioned to do a 12-volume book project for Weymouth, England on the occasion of the Olympics. The line, though, was imaginary; what I actually saw, or read, was this Wikipedia entry for Weymouth, Dorset.

At the time, hundreds of editors, a combination of real humans and bots, had created the 7,000 word entry, with 19 images, telling the story of this place, which I knew nothing about.

Here, I learned that Puritans from this Weymouth had crossed the ocean and founded the town that was to become Weymouth, Massachusetts. This line was the hook. In a way it was like finding a loose thread, just before you start pulling.

But it was the fragility of that dotted line that taunted me. A risky journey, under true life-and-death conditions — marked today with place-names on a map, and little else.

What I wanted to know was this: does the line exist today? Where is it? Could I see it? What had become of these twin towns, separated at birth? Could I draw my own connections and stitch them back together, 377 years later?

Or would I pull on a thread and unravel something?

The only plan I had was to create a series of books. I knew I would author these books, but not much else. What I mean is — I didn’t really know what I was getting into. So the way I got into it was somewhat by chance. I simply drove to the American Weymouth on January 10, 2012 to see what would happen.

All data, people and connections encountered were fair game for me, for interaction and incorporation into the project.

I was no stranger to chance. I had just completed a book project based on a single object in the John Cage archives, and had used chance operations to generate its content and design.

To Weymouth, I brought intent, and my own agency, but no agenda.

So I drove to Weymouth.

My destination was the Jason Holbrook House, built in 1763. Not exactly pilgrim material, but home to the Weymouth Historical Society.

I entered the back door and met Jim, a 92-year-old man and self-proclaimed “curator”. He offered a tour of the house and I accepted, and recorded the conversation.

What followed was a 2-hour journey through the rooms of the house, with stories about objects in their collection, and into Jim’s own memories.

I took hundreds of photographs that day in Weymouth, Massachusetts.

Two of them are at the heart of this project.

One is a photograph of a page in a book.

Near the end of the tour I was sitting in the kitchen, chatting with some of the elders hanging out there, and Jim mentioned that a couple had visited recently — from Weymouth, England. He was convinced that this couple was associated with my project, and was intent on telling me exactly when they had visited. So he searched for the guest book where they had signed their names and address. Sure enough, he brought over the book and there they were. 2 names, a man and a woman, who had visited in October 2011. I photographed the page.

The other photograph I took was out back, behind the house, in a shed. An exhibit of shoes was on display, describing the history of the Stetson Shoe Company.

The shoe factory had been just down the road, and had employed most of the town for over a hundred years, before shutting down in the 1970s.

There, I took a photograph of a reproduction of a photograph.

Here it is. In it, a bearded man holds a shoe, next to a display of shoes. But it was the typography that fascinated me. I’d seen late 19th-century American letterforms similar to this before, but nothing quite so geometric and stilted and odd. And the fact that it was here, in the shed, down the road from the factory — and that this typography probably hadn’t had much of a life beyond a mile or two from this very spot where I was taking the photograph — grabbed me.

Weymouths

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