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A Public Space: Main Street Square Christopher Kelty In the late 1960s the social psychologist Stanley Milgram ran an experiment in which he instructed several randomly chosen people in Nebraska to send postcards to a particular stockbroker in Massachusetts. The catch was that each person could only give the postcards to someone they knew personally, with instructions for that person to do the same in turn. Each time an individual handed on the postcards, they were also instructed to send a separate card to Milgram. In this way, the researcher was able to trace exactly how a postcard might travel across the country from one stranger to another, through only friends and relatives. Milgram uncovered a surprising fact: on average it took only six postcards to get from rural farmers and townspeople in Nebraska to a well-heeled professional in Boston. Hence, six degrees of separation. Today, sociologists, mathematicians and computer scientists get uncharacteristically excited about this result—it suggests that society is connected in oddly dense and random ways—it proves, objectively, that we are nowhere near as isolated as we feel subjectively. It suggests that if we simply reached out to just one person beyond those we already know well, we’d be connected to almost everyone else, share the same world they live in, maybe discover commonalities we assumed impossible. This is why the images in Paul Druecke’s A Public Space are not only pictures of Main Street Square, but pictures of a society; they are pictures of a connection we can understand, but not often feel, or experience. At first glance, they are pictures of a place we can call our own, if we choose to—a public square. Each photo is a document of one attitude, one angle, one subjective view through which we might learn to see the place anew; string them together and Main Street Square becomes more than just a stop on a contested light rail, more than a city council’s troubled dream of revitalization. But at second glance these photographs represent a weave of people and relationships. Each of the photographers was required to choose the next, creating that dense and random net of relations that Milgram discovered. Even if only six photographers participated, you might well be a friend of a friend of a photographer—or even an enemy of a friend. You are only a shutterclick, a postcard, away from participation in this project. As with the society they represent, these photographs might show a public in homogenous agreement or one in vitriolic conflict; they might mirror the propaganda of urban development, or issue a devastating critique of gentrification. Each image gives us a sense of what it feels like to be connected—to be one, two, three degrees from a whole city—and to assert it visually, through a particular framing, focus, or perspective. When Milgram did his first experiment, skeptics replied that it was all well and good to prove that white people in Nebraska could contact white people in Massachusetts, but it was surely untrue of the stark racial divide that plagues the nation. So Milgram and others started a second study stringing blacks in Watts, Los Angeles, to whites and blacks in New York. The result: six degrees of separation. Yet, even though the result was the same, the objection is still valid. Although it may be a fact that we are only six degrees of separation apart, we are still overwhelmed with stories of division and separation: of white and black (or now of red and blue), of urban isolation and ideological alienation. This story of isolation is too easy, though—and too wrong. Our connections with each other are complicated, surprising, reticulate. Mr. Druecke’s project gives us a way to start picturing ourselves in new stories, a way to make our connections to each other more obvious, and our disconnections less spurious; if we choose, it gives us the means to see how others see, and to see just how different it is.
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