INCIDENT No. 87: Barbara Weissberger
General Delivery 59631 is the mailing address
for the town of Basin, Montana (population approximately 200) which began as a 19th century
mining camp, and lies just off Interstate 15 about mid-way between the cities of Butte and Helena. Last summer, like
each summer for the past 15 years, I lived and worked in Basin for an extended period of time. I worked in a studio with a
great, blue-green, recessed window in which I made the installation that appears in the foreground of these photographs. My
view out the window was of Basin Street, the town’s faded main drag where the sight of Hutterite girls three or four
to an ATV is not unusual. Though Hudson and Basin are very
different places, Incident Report, another American main street storefront, was prominent in my thoughts as I worked on these
images in the Basin studio. I saw an opportunity to fold together several different kinds of spaces – geographic and
sociologic (eastern and western US), built and natural (the view from inside a building out to mountains), public and private
(the street and the studio). Here is the view of Basin Street and beyond as seen from Warren Street.
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