One of the hallmarks of serving as a Valley News photo intern is the completion of at least one long-term project, a subject a photographer can take the time to examine from many different angles.
For our most recent intern, Carly Geraci, that subject remained elusive. “I was putting a lot of pressure on myself,” she said. She was searching for a subject “that was truly genuine to who I am.”
It wasn’t until she attended an April photojournalism workshop, in Denver, that she discovered what she would focus on. She talked with another photographer about how much she enjoyed diners and had taken comfort in them in the Upper Valley. “She told me, you should go back” to the diners and make a project out of it.
“I grew up in a city where diners are everywhere,” Geraci said of her native Detroit.
But the diners where she gathered with high school friends all had a franchised sameness to them, whereas the Upper Valley’s diners each have personalities of their own. And before coming to work at 24 Interchange Drive, she’d never been in what she called “a true diner,” a classic diner car.
Even with the idiosyncrasies of the local diners, they “felt kind of like home to me when I was in a new place.”
People strike up conversations in diners, even with perfect strangers. One of her first stops was at the Fairlee Diner, where within 15 minutes of her arrival she found herself talking to a regular patron about his life. He told her about his son, about his decade of sobriety and what had gone before.
She went to diners to eat, but that’s not all that a diner is for. Some folks are there when the door opens in the morning, for a coffee out of a familiar cup, poured by a familiar hand. Especially for older patrons, who go to the diner, yes, to eat, but mainly to socialize “that might be the highlight of their day.”
Photographing diners expanded Carly’s understanding of them, which is perhaps the chief lesson of looking at anything closely enough. Scrutiny reveals a subject’s complexities.
“I feel like my pictures are only a small glimpse at the diners,” she said. “I feel like diners are kind of more than what they look like.” Between the staff and the patrons a sense of community develops that’s unique to that counter, those booths.
Diners are largely, if not entirely, an American institution, and now that she’s moved on to another internship, at the Dallas Morning News, the city is new, but the subject remains the same.
“I’ve already started to look at the diners,” she said.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
