An editor, a supporter, a much appreciated boost

Scott Nichols loves art, especially photography. At least, that's what I recall him telling me almost four years ago when he called me to talk about The Smooch! Project. Scott is also the News Editor for the Eastside Review, a weekly community newspaper covering a Saint Paul, Minnesota neighborhood. At the time, I was living in the downtown neighborhood called Lowertown, which was included in Scott's coverage area. He had heard of our project and wanted to do a story. It ended up becoming much more than that.

The Fall 2006 St. Paul Art Crawl was coming up and The Smooch! Project was going to be a part of it. Scott was planning to include the upcoming shoot in his next issue. Hooray, I remember thinking. That would be cool. Then he also proposed what I thought was a brilliant idea (IMHO): Why not invite Eastside Review readers to attend the shoot and feature their Smooch! Archive photos and personal stories in later issues of the paper. Wow. Didn't I say BRILLIANT? Needless to say, I was totally thrilled.

Over the next three months -- 9 issues in all -- photos and stories about The Smooch! Project appeared within the pages of Scott's newspaper. For a project just completing its first year of growth, this coverage was a tremendous boost and very much appreciated. Scott and I occasionally kept in touch for another year but this fell away when I moved to Minneapolis, outside of his newspaper's coverage area. The Smooch! Project continued to grow.

Now I am working my way back through the collected archive, as I gather and prepare the images to upload onto The Smooch! Project website. Last week, as I was completing more archive photos gathered in 2008, I came across this one:

I had set up a Smooch! shoot at the 2008 Stone Arch Bridge Festival of the Arts, always held during Father's Day weekend in the Minneapolis. Among the many people I met and photographed during that two-day event, one of them stood out. Here is an image of Scott Nichols, being smooched by his lovely wife, Amy. This was the first time I had ever met this man and to also meet his beautiful family was a real bonus. They were out on a weekend family outing and had no idea that they were going to stumble over The Smooch! Project that day. Now that the project was no longer a subject for his newspaper, Scott was free to become part of a project he had once only written about.

The image, Amy luvs Scott, has been uploaded to the website and is now part of The Smooch! Project Archive online, where it belongs. I was really happy to finally meet him and glad that he found the opportunity to become part of the project. His coverage of this heart-lifting effort to collect 10,000 images of people showing affection to someone they love was an important part of our early years. I have not forgotten and to this day, I remain very grateful for his interest and support.

There is still much more work to be done to complete the current archive. At the moment, I have completed my work on only one of the two days from that shoot but I hope to complete all of the Stone Arch Bridge Festival images soon. My original goal was to finish our work on the images already collected here in Minnesota BEFORE we headed out on our first Smooch! Project road trip. Not gonna happen. We're about 75 percent there: currently 740 of almost 1,100 images are now online. But -- exciting news: We are leaving for . . . .

Detroit!

In less than a week, we will be embarking on the very first (and very exciting, of course!) Smooch! Project road trip. We've selected Detroit for several reasons, the primary one being that we consider this city to be ground zero for the financial challenges we have all be facing here in the United States. Hopelessness and senseless violence is a daily occurrence there. We think The Smooch! Project can help. We'll only be within the city for a couple of days but we plan to connect with as many people on the ground as we can to prepare for a later return trip to begin a larger, more focused effort. We'll be holding at least one shoot to collect a few representative images as well and come back home. Then we'll have everything we need to write a rock-solid grant proposal. We believe the transformative imagery of The Smooch! Project has the power to heal a community. If our work there can break the cycle and stop even one violent episode, it will be entirely worth the effort. If you're not on our mailing list to get the updates on our progress, you should be! It's easy to do. The signup form is in the right hand column of this blog.

More stories to come . . .