Journey to the Thumb | How a Collection is Made

I am Sheryl L. Sutter. Michigan’s Thumb is not a backdrop I discovered. It is the country I live in.

In 1994, my husband, Dan, and I settled in Lapeer. The house was modest. It was enough. From here the fields open, the barns hold their weather, and the backroads still lead somewhere worth going.

The collection began in 2016, on ordinary workdays. I was already driving the Thumb with a camera in the car. What changed was the looking. The barns were not scenery. The silos were not props. The fields were not empty space between towns. They were the record of a place that had already shaped us, and I started to keep that record on purpose.

For six years I went back. Same roads in different months. Same structures in different light. Thousands of frames. The ones that remain are the MI Eye on the Thumb Collection — grey wood, red paint still holding, shacks in the fence line, the other quiet things that stand beside them.

The work did not come from ease. In 2003 we nearly lost the house. In the years that followed we lost a son-in-law, a grandson, both of our mothers, and a brother. I say that only because the archive did not grow beside an unbroken life. It grew because the land was still there when the days were not. Photographing it was a way to stay in the world.

U R There Photography came later, when the pictures needed a life outside the files. I wanted them in rooms — on a wall, a board, a tile, a clock — so the Thumb could be lived with, not only looked at once and closed.

I am more at ease behind the camera than in front of a room. The work is still made from a small office in Lapeer, and from the roads that leave it. The collection is not finished. The light keeps changing. The barns are still standing. I am still going out.