C. E. Yocam.

C. E. Yocam operated a photographic studio at Du Bois, Nebraska — a village of fewer than four hundred souls on the Missouri Pacific line in Pawnee County, in the far southeastern corner of the state — during the long boom years of the real-photo postcard, roughly 1907 through 1912. His full name is, at present, not recovered; the cards are imprinted simply C. E. Yocam or Yocam, Photo Studio, Du Bois, Nebr.

What he did, with patience and unmistakable wit, was travel an arc of small Nebraska county-seat and rail-stop towns and photograph their busiest commercial blocks — usually from a low sidewalk angle that pulled the cornices and bay windows up into the frame and stacked the telephone poles into a receding vertical line. He then captioned each card Among the Sky-Scrapers, with the name of the town and a plate number, and sold the result back to the townspeople who were the joke's first audience.

The conceit was simple and durable: prairie Nebraska impersonating Manhattan, the joke gentle enough that the townspeople bought the cards and mailed them home. Some are numbered as high as 101 (Fairbury) and beyond, which means the series ran to hundreds of plates — most of them now scattered, uncatalogued, in attics and dealer boxes across the Midwest.

Yocam is not in any standard photographic reference the archive has yet consulted. What survives is the work itself — the cards, the captions, the verso imprint — and what can be reconstructed from postmarks, stamp issues, and the small accidents of how the cards were sent. This page will grow as more material is catalogued and as the man himself, perhaps, comes into focus.