Colossus of Roads

Born and raised in New York City, Evan graduated from Brown University and received his Master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Specialties include mathematics, science, and geography / GIS—Geographic Information Systems.

His inspiration to road-trip first came courtesy a MoMA retrospective of photographer Lee Friedlander. Evan took to the open road after [college] graduation, journeying 13,500 miles through 29 states and three Canadian provinces (as well as D.C.) over three months. He captured moments with photographs of communities few venture to see. He also began to visit post offices for souvenirs—both physical and nostalgic—en route, amassing postmarks and stories from 250 post offices by the time he returned to the Big Apple. His longest trip entailed 17,000+ miles of driving as he visited 1,450 post offices over 3.5 months.

Evan has logged dozens of flights and tens of thousands of miles driven, visiting more than 11,000 post offices spanning all 50 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He takes to flying or driving around the country whenever feasible, exploring cities, suburbia, and rural America alike.

He aims to draw attention to some oft-overlooked backbones of our national infrastructure (and history): the U.S. Postal Service and the vast body of infrastructure created as part of F.D.R.'s New Deal programs during the 1930s-40s. Thousands of his postal photographs are viewable as part a partnership with the Post Mark Collectors Club (PMCC), which maintains a physical archive of 55,000 post office photographs as well as the more than 33,000 digitized images viewable online. Evan curates and manages every upload to the online photo project, the largest of its type in the world!

Evan's work with The Living New Deal has resulted in the documentation and geocoding of more than 5,000 New Deal projects: post offices, city halls, schools, courthouses, parks, streets, water systems, and more, all constructed or developed with the support of FDR's "alphabet soup" programs. This online archive, too, is the largest of its kind. Hundreds of Evan's photos and the product of hundreds of hours of his research are available at The Living New Deal, with particular emphasis on post offices and attendant New Deal artwork (commissioned murals and sculptures) therein.