Ideastream Public Media recently published and uploaded a story about Ohio photographer David Schwartz, whose images will be featured in forthcoming U.S. postage stamps about Route 66’s centennial.
Here’s the seven-minute video documentary:
Schwartz said he’s made over 40 trips on Route 66 over the past two decades to document the highway.
In the story, he tells about that fateful day that he received a phone call from the USPS:
“One day the phone rings, and I pick it up and the person on the other end says they represent the United States Postal Service. And they’ve been searching for a photographer to use for the centennial stamp collection they’re creating,” Schwartz said. “After I picked myself up off the floor, I said, ‘All right, let’s do it.’”
The USPS had already done research on Schwartz’s website to present him with initial ideas but wanted to know what other images he might have. Over two decades, he’s acquired quite a few.
“I did a deep dive into my archive and probably gave them way too many photos,” Schwartz said with a laugh. “But you’ve got to think about, ‘Okay, how does this translate on a stamp?’”
Schwartz said he enjoys capturing images in a square format, harkening back to his earlier days shooting film on a Hasselblad camera. As it turns out, that format translates perfectly to a square postage stamp.
“Then you have to think about, we want to represent each state. You also want to show a wide view of what Route 66 is,” he said. “Then there’s other things like the legalities of getting everything that’s in the photograph signed off on and able to be used in the stamp.”
Schwartz’s Route 66 images can be seen online here. His Ohio home is also hosting an open house of his work on Saturday.
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