The Finding Our Main Street project is a response to visiting photographer and urban planner Sandy Sorlien’s documentary art series, The Heart of Town. Students in M.J. Iuppa’s Encounters with the Arts class and Dr. Mark Rice’s Picturing the Past class were given the assignment to photograph their Main Street. The ambition was to capture our regional landscape, the cities and small towns we call home. By looking closely at these photographs, viewers will discover a collective personal narrative that links us to landscapes that are our landmarks.

On Thursday April 11, 2013, at 7:30 p.m. in Basil 135, Sandy Sorlien, noted photographer and urbanist will deliver the fifth annual America Seen photography lecture sponsored by the American Studies department. Sorlien’s lecture will discuss two distinct but related bodies of work. Her documentary art series, The Heart of Town, visits distressed and evolving 21st century Main Streets. In 2011, Sandy launched the Transect Collection, an online photographic resource. These images analyze the frontages of walkable places according to the rural-to-urban Transect, a New Urbanist planning framework. After a career in photographic education, Sandy has worked as a Transect zoning code writer since 2004. She now combines these experiences to look at our urban centers and small towns as models for a more resilient future.