I Shot Tattered Old Glory Using An Unusual Photography Accessory
Tattered Old Glory, Triangle, VA
Text and photograph © Mark Petty
It’s 2010. I’m in Triangle, VA for the first time. It’s a small town abutting the large Marine Corps Base Quantico. With a Wista 4x5 Field view camera in the back of my SUV, I’m driving up and down every street looking for possible subjects. Suddenly, there it is, at the end of a dead end street - a uniquely-tattered American flag hanging on a ramshackle garage.
A car is parked on the street in front of the house. I knock on the door several times. No one answers, so I continue my search elsewhere instead of trespassing.
I leave Triangle on my long drive from Washington, D.C., where our daughter lives, to our home in Florida. I’m taking the back roads, hoping to discover photographs in the small towns along the way. A day later, on a rural road in Georgia a person with a Marine insignia on his hat pulls over, skids to a stop and angrily demands to know “What the fuck is that,” pointing menacingly at my camera on its tripod.
“The camera of a proud American!” I yell back. We talk. I tell him my father flew 50 missions over Sicily and Italy in WWII. It defuses an otherwise close call.
Several months later I’m back on the road up the East Coast, driving through small towns once more. I plan on visiting the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, VA. It was closed last time I was in town. I can also revisit the tattered flag while I’m there.
Due to my encounter in Georgia I’m trying to figure out how to blend in more while driving the rural backroads, without assuming a fake persona. Unexpectedly, I find a possible solution in the gift shop of the Marine museum in Triangle - a POW/MIA bumper sticker. In 1968 the father of my best friend went missing in action in Vietnam. We were in 9th grade. I visit his father’s name, etched on the Vietnam War Memorial, every time I’m on the Mall in D.C. It’s very meaningful to me.
I put the sticker on my bumper and drive straight to the garage on the dead end street, just minutes away. When I arrive the flag is still there. I strategically park, hoping the POW/MIA sticker can be seen by anyone in the house who’s curious. I knock on the door and after a while a kindly woman, older than me, answers the door. I explain myself and ask permission to photograph her garage and the flag.
She looks at me, looks at my car, and looks back at me. She cocks her head to one side and says “You were here a few months ago, weren’t you?”
“Yes, Ma’am, I was.”
“Well you go right ahead and take your pictures,” she says.
Fifteen years later I still have a POW/MIA sticker on my car. Not only has it opened several other photographic opportunities for me, it saved me from a ticket when I was pulled over by a veteran who is now a Georgia Highway Patrolman.