Twenty years of fine art photography across Vermont, New York, and New Mexico. Aerial surveys from Princeton Airport at 4:30 in the morning. Junkyards discovered after six months of driving past the same one. The founder of American Notecards built this the only way a photographer knows how: by going to the place, at the right time, and not leaving until it was right.
2002.
It started with an airplane and a camera. Around 2002, Jerry Trudell was doing aerial photography across Vermont — Mount Mansfield, Camel's Hump, Lake Champlain — catching the best views the state had to offer from a few thousand feet up. The photos were good. Good enough that when he dropped them off at gift shops and country stores around Burlington, they sold.
The manufacturing was entirely by hand. Four-by-six photographic prints, double-sided tape, blank notecards shipped in from Uline, each one wrapped with an envelope and sold for a dollar forty in cost. Total hands-on production. No manufacturer, no printer, no middleman.
It worked. He built the business to over fifty locations — gift shops, country stores, and bookstores across Vermont. Seasonal reorders. Regular accounts. A real business, built entirely on fine art photography and a roll of double-sided tape.
4:30 in the morning.
When Trudell relocated to New York, he brought the business — this time built on New York aerial views. Flying out of Princeton Airport, he'd be there at 4:30am for pre-flight, never rushing, always planning. The goal was to be airborne with exactly twenty-five minutes before scheduled sunrise, arriving over New York Harbor the moment the sun broke.
He flew with FAA clearance over the city — orbiting Central Park at exactly two thousand feet, timing every shot to a five-minute window. Those images are on Getty Images, where they still live. Jerry Trudell is a Getty contributor — which matters when the notecards are sitting on a shelf next to mass-market product. These aren't snapshots.
One junkyard on the right.
Trudell had a job driving blood samples from the VA clinic in Artesia, New Mexico to Albuquerque — five hundred miles a day, every day. For over six months, every single morning on the way down, there was a massive junkyard on the right side of the road. The biggest he'd ever encountered.
Instantly hooked. A dozen more junkyards followed across New Mexico. The photography that came out of it — dramatic angles, isolated subjects, warm desert haze — became the Junkyard Specials and Americana Route 66 series.
Four years of gardens.
Before the cars, there were flowers. Trudell grew them and photographed them in Barton, Vermont for four years. And before Vermont, the Sandia Mountains outside Albuquerque — his first year there, he rented a room in a trailer ten miles from the tramway just so he could hike and photograph every single day.
That breadth — flowers, landscapes, cars — is part of what makes the series catalogue work. Each one is a genuine passion project, not a market calculation. You can tell the difference on a shelf.
The technology caught up.
The original Vermont business went quiet after the stock market crash. Then New York. Then health challenges, then the pandemic. Twenty years of life in between — but the photography never stopped.
American Notecards is that vision: series rooted in real American places, sold through the locally-owned stores that actually know their communities. The cards are getting better. The scope is getting wider. The double-sided tape is retired.