Upland

Description: Upland, by Scott Kiernan and Ethan Miller, 2016, hardbound book, 72 pgs.

Upland is constructed solely of image-headline pairs as they originally appeared in The Upland News in 1969-72, a newspaper circular from the small Southern California town of Upland, CA. Think of a local cheaply printed circular with a hefty coupon section in the back, small-town stories and the reporting to match.

The images have been further disfigured and destroyed by Google's Newspaper Project, through compression algorithms and physical speed of bulk-scanning fragile newsprint material, which creates visual collapses of foreground and background in much of the digitized imagery. The Upland News stands out in particular for the editorial oddity and pointed captioning of its images, especially when removed from their original surrounding stories and content.
The selections were arranged by considering only the text of the image-headline pairs, creating a poem describing an interior narrative of Upland.