SpiralTruth

I was noticing a lot of images floating around the web that shared a common theme. They either were or looked like a post card, and they had some sort of secret hope or fear or memory written on them. A couple of days ago, I finally decided to track down the source. Of course, in the age of Google, tracking down the source hardly ever amounts to more than an hour of dedicated searching. The only difficulty with these images was that they didn’t contain any sort of brand logo… only a certain style. In addition, the images I had been looking at had no sort of attribution made by the person who had uploaded them (tsk, tsk!) After typing in a few of the secrets, I eventually found a link to one of the images, which mentioned “Post Secret” and voila! I had found the source. Kind of.

Frank Warren had the idea back in 2003 to ask a bunch of strangers to send him their deepest, darkest secrets. Turns out, a lot of people have some pretty interesting secrets. Enough for Frank to be swamped with postcards and have enough material to pump out five books (that I know of) to date. I now have four of them on order. Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about:

What I love about these, even the really sad ones, is that they capture the strength of the human spirit in a very profound and simple way. The anonymity gives each author the ability to speak the raw truth about some aspect of their lives without fear of judgment. And there’s an interesting awareness that emerges as you read through these, that perhaps the most telltale sign of “being human” is the feeling of isolation that our secrets create. We are all together in our loneliness.

I’ve always seen the pursuit of art as a very noble thing. To me, it’s a basic decision to try and create meaning and beauty out of a sometimes chaotic and ugly world. And I think that the thousands of anonymous artists in Frank’s collections do just that.

Finally, here’s a video that explains a bit about the project and shows some of the postcards:

Yeah, I know. It pushes the drama a bit in some places. But it’s a nice escape from worrying about whether or not the Free World will implode because of a bunch of asshole bankers… and maybe it’s a reminder that no matter what happens, we’ll find ourselves struggling with the same basic problems and reaching for the same basic heights.

Follow Frank’s stuff at: postsecret.com and postsecretcommunity.com. Be sure to grab local copies of any pics you like, as they change every Sunday, and there doesn’t seem to be an archive on the site.