Anywhere | Anytime: A photographic mission to immortalize Southeast Missouri, scene by scene

One of the ways we know something has become normal is that we don't notice it anymore. We miss the intricacies, the beauty and what has not yet been made right about what is around us.

"Make it new," the 20th-Century Modernist poet and critic Ezra Pound counseled. Throughout the next issues of mind + body, we're asking photographers from our region to do just that. We want them to show us how they view this place we call home, to show us where we live through their eyes and the lens of their camera. Make it new by showing us what we miss. It's what art does.

In the first installment of this series, Anna Estes of Cape Girardeau shows us what Southeast Missouri means to her through photos from her landscape series "Anywhere | Anytime."

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Anywhere | Anytime: A photographic mission to immortalize Southeast Missouri, scene by scene

~Word and photos by Anna Estes

To me, Southeast Missouri is about the past and the present being entwined. For example, I drove an '80's car my first year of driving and then an early-'90's car for the following three years -- all while having the newest phone in my pocket and the newest music on the radio. The changes in Southeast Missouri are thrilling; I love seeing and experiencing the new restaurants, boutiques, art and events that are coming to life in this community. But what I fear is that people don't care about the history that happened 40, 50 or 60 years ago, and that they don't think that right now is history. There are obviously historic, Civil-War era landmarks that are taken care of and often talked about, but what about those last buildings and cars that reflect the 1960s through the 1980s?

Preserving ghosts of places and what they once meant to people is extremely important to me. That was the mission I set out to do through these photographs: immortalize the buildings and nostalgic scenes in Cape Girardeau and the surrounding areas that are threatened by modernization and even destruction. Strapped with a couple of Fujifilm disposable cameras, I drove around looking for things that "have been" and "could be."

I began this series in February of 2018 and have amassed more than 140 pictures of these moments; my hope is to continue this series until I feel like there are no places left that need to be memorialized. Despite labeling myself as a portrait photographer, this landscape and architecture series has become close to my heart. It's been exciting and adventurous to watch these pictures and places take on their own age, their own personality and most importantly, their own story.