Servants of the Map

Servants of the Map [114/366], a photo by timsackton on Flickr.

114/366

For Round 21 of the Get Pushed challenge group on Flickr, I was paired with Imani Danielle, who challenged me to " take a photo that is based on a song, book, or movie."

One of the best books I've read in the past year or so is Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett. It is a collection of loosely linked short stories; in the title story, set in the 1860s, the main character is a British surveyor in the Himalayas who narrates his adventures via a series of letters to his wife back home in England. Letters recur throughout the stories, providing connecting threads to link families across time and space.

While thinking of how to capture this theme in photography, I remembered my own collection of letters from my childhood and early adulthood. Although I try not to keep too many mementos, I do have a collection of postcards my grandparents sent me when I was a child, as well as letters exchanged with my sister when she was at summer camp during her teenage years, a letter my mom sent me for my college graduation, and a letter from a college friend who spent part of a summer abroad in Bolivia. To up the antique feel, I applied a 'aged photo' filter in post using Lightroom 4.