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 cheaply-printed local 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 the physical speed of bulk-scanning fragile newsprint material, creating 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 tale of Upland. The chance juxtaposition of imagery portrays a parallel embedded narrative.
Scott Kiernan & Ethan Miller 2016