(Source: NPR)

Image Courtesy: NPR - Click to visit Project website

When politicians and the media mention Main Street, they evoke one people and one place. But there are over 10,466 streets named Main in the United States, and they tell all kinds of stories. Once you start looking, you’ll notice Main Streets are everywhere and tell all kinds of stories. There’s a Main Street in San Luis, Arizona that dead-ends right into the Mexican border. The Main Street in Melvindale, Michigan runs through a trailer park in the shadows of Ford’s River Rouge plant, once the largest factory in the world. Main Street is small town and urban center; it is the thriving business district and the prostitution stroll; it is the places where we live, the places where we work, and sometimes, it is the places we have abandoned.

Mapping Main Street (MMS) is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets.  The goal is to document every street named Main in the country by going to each of these over 10,466 places, taking a photo, recording a video or writing a brief story.

The MMS team already got a head start. In May, the MMS team packed into a 1996 Suburu station wagon and started a 12,000 mile journey across the country to visit Main Streets. In the process, the team took photos, shot videos, and interviewed people. On Main Street in a small town in West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, the team met a retired man who is fixing up a boarded-up house that was once a hotel for jazz musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and B.B. King during segregation. In New Hope, PA, we sat down for beers with a cop on Main Street who talked about strangest fetishes he had come across in his line of work.  The team talked with farm laborers and business owners, people out on their porches and people on park benches. They even stood in empty fields…all on Main Streets across the country.

Now the Mapping Main Street team invites you to contribute stories and images of your Main Street on the Mapping Main Street website.  Anyone can contribute to this project. The only requirement is that all photos and videos must be taken on a street named Main.  MMS team is using Flickr to gather all photographs for the project.You can upload any videos you would like to submit for the project to YouTube or Vimeo. Just tag your video with “mappingmainstreet” and MMS team can include it in the project.

For more detailed instructions for uploading your images (photos and videos), visit the Project’s awesome website.  While you are there don’t forget to checkout the latest collection of photos and videos sent in from the Main Streets around the country.   Also, if you are a Facebook-er show your support by becoming a “fan” of this project and if you like to follow the updates on Twitter,  here is the team’s Twitter handle: @mappingmainst).