Overview

This footage by JoAnn Elam was probably shot in San Francisco, where Elam spent the “Summer of Love” in 1967 and which she perhaps visited again later. First rapidly edited, the footage then slows down to focus on rows of houses, the street numbers on their façades, and their mail slots. As 37th Av. & S.F. CA and many other elements about the US Post Office in this collection evidence, what seems to have fascinated Elam about the mail was the way it circulated within neighborhoods, from one house to the next, thereby connecting the people who lived in them together. At the end, one handwritten note reads: “To be looked at one frame at a time,” some directions possibly referring to the following series of rapidly edited shots of nature and dogs running in a park.