Dear B.J.

Postcards from the Pandemic

Imagine stumbling upon a timeworn box of postcards. Maybe you are exploring a flea market, a museum archive, or even a dusty attic. A sense of voyeurism compels you to look closer and to read the one-sided correspondence on the cards. Perhaps you wonder about the writer, the addressee, and the images themselves. And maybe, just maybe, you find yourself time-traveling as you experience the life witnessed in these intimate missives. 

The Postcards

This is the premise behind my Dear B.J.: Postcards from the Pandemic. This series is my creative non-fiction interpretation of life in Appalachia during the COVID-19 pandemic, as imagined through intimate postcard-sized images and one side of written correspondence. Each card features a black and white photograph with a backside written to a mysterious B.J. and signed by “ME.” Through these vagaries, I invite you into a shared world. Perhaps you wonder who B.J. was, or maybe you know. Perhaps you relate to the “ME,” who signed the cards. And as you think about it all, possibly you overlay my visual narrative over your own. 

The Images

For the imagery, I began photographing my neighborhood during daily walks in March 2020, when social isolation became the normal way of life. These images are purposefully reminiscent of the photography prevalent during the 1918 pandemic, specifically Pictorialism. This turn-of-the-20th-century art movement employed photographic manipulation to heighten grain and increase shadows to enhance an image’s emotive and atmospheric qualities. Such images read like poetry to me and are what I envisioned when working with my photographs. 

Much like the end products of Pictorialism and early tourism memorabilia, I chose to print my artwork using a photo-mechanical process. I finished these as photopolymer gravure prints, a modern incarnation of the historic photogravure practice. Photopolymer gravures involve transferring an image to a light-sensitive printing plate, which is then developed, hardened, inked and paper is pressed onto the plate to create the end photograph.

The Tasty Bits

• William Paine’s Southwest Times’ story about L.S. King and her show at the Fine Art Center for the New River Valley (June 2021)

• L.S. King’s very short talk from her MFA Thesis Show (April 2021)

• Grace Sear’s story on the MFA Show (March 2021)

• King received a Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society Graduate Research Grant for this project (March 2021)

• Seth Clabough and Hannah Gutzwiller’s review of Art Appalachia: 2020 and L.S. King’s Rock Castle Gorge Overlook, Floyd, Virginia (November 2020)

The 11-minute Art Talk

In the Know

Want to see more? Sign up for L.S. King’s mailing list or check back here. She has so many plans for this series including future exhibitions, a book, a collector’s box, and subscription packages.