[Infowarrior] - Odyssey of State Capitols and State Suspicion

[Richard Forno]

Odyssey of State Capitols and State Suspicion
By KATHRYN SHATTUCK
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/arts/design/20shat.html?pagewanted=print

IN a recent morning interview in a Midtown Manhattan office Ramak Fazel came
across as the quintessential world citizen: tall, slim and elegant, his
English tinged with an untraceable accent and peppered here and there with
an Italian phrase.

He also exuded the weariness of a frequent flier, having arrived the
afternoon before at Newark Liberty Airport, where he was delayed for nearly
three hours while United States Customs and Border Protection agents
questioned him about the purpose of his trip, searched his baggage and
photocopied the pages of his personal agenda.

That routine is something that Mr. Fazel, a 42-year-old freelance
photographer who lives in Milan, Italy, has come to know well, and he takes
pains to come across as favorably as possible. For starters, he makes sure
his face is always immaculately cleanshaven.

³I have become the poster boy for Gillette,² he said, somewhat ruefully.

Shaving was one of the last things on Mr. Fazel¹s mind when, on Aug. 7,
2006, he set out on a photographic and philatelic odyssey from his mother¹s
home in Fort Wayne, Ind. His mission was to photograph each of the nation¹s
50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard from each city, using
postage stamps from a childhood collection. Each postcard would be mailed to
the next state on his journey, where he would pick it up, continuing until
he had gone full circle back to Indiana.

But there was a problem. On a flight from Sacramento, Calif., to Honolulu,
Mr. Fazel described his project to a fellow passenger. He later discovered
that she had reported him as suspicious ‹ perhaps to the pilot or the
Transportation Security Administration ‹ and taken a picture of him as he
slept.

Maybe it was because he was vaguely foreign looking, he reasoned, and his
photographic endeavor seemed menacing in a post-9/11 landscape. He also had
a three-day growth of beard, he recalled. And, although Mr. Fazel grew up
mostly in the United States and is an American citizen, there was his
Iranian name.

In his view that woman¹s report began a chain reaction, turning him into a
person of interest for officials from local law enforcement agencies on up
to the F.B.I. On a stop in Annapolis, Md., for example, he was interrogated
about his activities and read his Miranda rights. Today, he said, his name
lingers on what he thinks of simply as the ³the list.² (He doesn¹t know
where it originated or who controls it.) He believes it has prevented him
from receiving a visa to India and caused him be questioned at the border of
Poland, both of which he had visited in the past. He said he has been
interrogated the last four times he has entered the United States.

That sense of stigmatization ‹ and the pursuit of life, liberty and art ‹ is
a steady undercurrent in ³49 State Capitols,² an exhibition of postcards,
photographs and ephemera from Mr. Fazel¹s 2006 trip that is to open on
Wednesday at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo. (He ran out of
money before he made it to Alaska.)

³I wanted to learn about America,² Mr. Fazel said. ³Visiting the capitols ‹
I don¹t want to say it¹s a dream, but we¹re led as children to believe that
it¹s kind of an obligation, that you need to see up close the country you
call home.

³I may live abroad, but my sense of being an American, of loving my country,
has never changed.²

Mr. Fazel, who moved to Italy in 1994, conceived of the trip in 2006 while
visiting his mother in Fort Wayne, where she called his attention to his
stamp collection in the attic. ³Do something with these,¹ ² he remembered
her saying.

He went to a collector who offered him less than he believed his stamps were
worth. ³I thought, what a shame to just sell these for $1,000,² Mr. Fazel
said. ³I felt they needed to be released from that static state, needed to
be released for their original purpose to be postage.²

What specifically inspired his trip was a page of stamps of the flags of the
50 states, in the order of their admission to the union, issued for the
nation¹s bicentennial in 1976. That was the year he began collecting,
shortly after moving to Fort Wayne, where the Fazels were the only Iranian
family.

Mr. Fazel was born in Iran but moved to the United States when he was 2
months old. His father, who was then working on his doctorate in psychology,
and his mother, who eventually became a potter, settled in Logan, Utah, and
then in Fort Wayne. In 1970 the family briefly moved back to Iran, where his
father taught in a satellite campus of Harvard Business School in Tehran; in
1976 they returned to Fort Wayne.

Mr. Fazel, feeling something of an outsider in a community divided into
white and black, athletically gifted and not, turned to stamp collecting at
his father¹s urging. ³Through stamps I had the chance to learn about America
and American culture,² he said. He collected enthusiastically, using money
he earned from mowing lawns and shoveling snow.

But with a driver¹s license came adult freedom, and Mr. Fazel tucked his
collection away. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering at Purdue
University, then went to New York to study graphic design and photography.
In 1994 he moved to Milan ‹ ³to enrich myself, invest in myself,² he said ‹
and to overcome a sense of his cultural limitations. He feels that he
succeeded, he said, yet he never stopped pondering what it meant for him to
be American.

So in the spring of 2006, stamps in hand, he began to plot his road trip,
researching the shortest distances from state capital to state capital and
the locations of post offices and Y.M.C.A.¹s (where he could shower and
swim). He spent $1,500 on a used Chevy van in which he would live and
another $2,000 to refurbish it. At night he would often seek out Wal-Mart
parking lots, where security was tight, to park his van and sleep.

In each capital Mr. Fazel would research the state¹s history in a library
and then design a 10-by-14-inch postcard on white stock, adorned with
mosaics he concocted from stamps related to the state.

The postcard he sent from Florida to Georgia honors space flight; the one
from Hawaii to Arizona pays tribute to Pearl Harbor. The postcard sent from
New York to Pennsylvania bears 11-cent stamps from 1965 that Mr. Fazel
arranged in the shape of the twin towers ‹ one toppling over, the other
being pierced by a commercial aviation stamp ‹ and with fire truck and
ambulance stamps and a commemorative stamp of St. Vincent¹s Hospital
Manhattan.

Mr. Fazel drove 17,345 miles in 78 days, mailing a postcard from each city
and picking it up in the next one, with the speed of the mail dictating the
pace of his trip. ³It was such a nice surprise to discover how reliable the
postal system was,² he said, adding that some of the cards arrived within 12
hours.

But in Jackson, Miss., his journey took its bizarre twist. One night, as he
sat in his van, a beam of light pierced his reverie. He heard his name over
a loudspeaker and a command to step out of the vehicle with his hands held
high.

Suddenly, Mr. Fazel said, he was forced to the ground, face to the concrete,
and handcuffed by a city police officer. His vehicle was searched, and when
the officers determined that nothing was amiss, Mr. Fazel was ordered to
leave the parking lot and continue down the road.

He said the officers told him that they had received a report that he was
aiming an automatic weapon at passing traffic.

Lee D. Vance, assistant chief of the Jackson city police, said he could not
confirm the incident because it had not resulted in an arrest and because
Mr. Fazel has not filed a complaint.

As Mr. Fazel continued his travels, he slowly began to perceive that he was
on some kind of watch list. In Atlanta he was prohibited from entering the
Capitol, he said, even as others did. In Columbia, S.C., he was questioned
on the grounds of the Capitol by a police officer who mentioned that he knew
Mr. Fazel lived in Italy.

On the morning of Oct. 3, he entered the Maryland Capitol in Annapolis,
where he presented identification and signed his name on a visitors¹ sheet.
A guard asked him to wait.

Suddenly, Mr. Fazel said, he was handcuffed and rushed through corridors
into a police station, where a man he later learned was a member of the
Maryland Joint Terrorism Task Force with the F.B.I. started speaking to him
in Farsi.

As Mr. Fazel related it, the experience went as follows:

³I¹m American,² Mr. Fazel said. ³I speak English.²

Another officer asked, ³Where are you really from?² Mr. Fazel produced his
Indiana driver¹s license.

³I can tell by looking at you that you¹re not from Fort Wayne,² the officer
replied.

After a four-hour encounter in which he was asked about a recent trip to
Iran for an Italian design magazine and about who was financing his trip to
state capitols, he was released without being charged. But he was also
warned by an F.B.I. official that he was now in the system and would have
troubles if he continued his trip.

Richard Wolf, a media coordinator with the F.B.I. in Baltimore, said he had
no knowledge of the incident. He added, ³We don¹t normally respond or
comment on any sort of leads we¹ve conducted with the Joint Terrorism Task
Force.²

Asked whether Mr. Fazel was on the government¹s terrorist watch list, Bill
Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman in Washington, said that as a matter of policy,
³we can¹t verify whether an individual is on a watch list or not.²

After the incident in Maryland Mr. Fazel called Brett R. Fleitz, a lawyer in
Indianapolis and a childhood friend. Mr. Fleitz said he immediately sought
to reassure him. ³I implored him to continue because he was very, very
doubtful about the prospects for going on and the dangers that might lie
ahead,² Mr. Fleitz said. ³I said, ŒDude, you¹re an American.¹ And Ramak
said, ŒNo, I¹m a naturalized American.¹ And I said: ŒIt doesn¹t matter.
There aren¹t two tiers of citizenship here. You have nothing to hide.¹ ²

He advised Mr. Fazel to greet law enforcement officers cheerfully and ³lay
it all out,² as well as to ask for and photocopy the business cards of the
authorities he encountered.

Mr. Fazel forged toward the last half of his destinations with his camera, a
1964 Rolleiflex. Despite being questioned at or denied entrance to the
remaining capitols, he got every one of his pictures: sometimes an image of
gilded rotundas or historic murals, other times pictures of the everyday,
the mundane. He photographed visitors in House chambers; a funeral
procession for Ann Richards, a onetime Texas governor; a portrait of Arnold
Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, in the waiting room of the
California governor¹s office.

And as the mood of his trip changed from joy to disquiet, he photographed
police officers at one capitol, and, at another, a ³caution² tape blocking
an entrance.

In Albany, Mr. Fazel was asked to wait at the entrance of the Capitol until
investigators talked with him. One gave him a big slap on the back, Mr.
Fazel recalled, and said, ³I know everything about you, and I know you¹ve
been getting a lot of attention.²

Thomas M. Peters, a senior investigator with the New York State Police,
confirmed that Mr. Fazel¹s journey from capitol to capitol had raised
suspicion.

³We were notified in advance that he was making his way up the East Coast
from his stops at other capitols, where he was challenged by law enforcement
agents,² he said. ³They indicated that at some times he seemed agitated and
seemed to be giving evasive answers to their questions, but we don¹t know
for sure because we were basically getting this information thirdhand.²

Mr. Peters added: ³He was fine with us. And if he was agitated, it was
probably because he got tired of being questioned.²

Looking back on his travels, Mr. Fazel said: ³Notwithstanding the intense
scrutiny, the trip was a positive experience. I¹m neither rancorous, nor do
I feel offended.²

Still, he said, he would like to see his name removed from ³the list,² or
whatever it is that caused him to be repeatedly stopped and questioned.

The journey ultimately left him wondering what it means to be American ‹
and, more fundamentally, who he really was.

³What I thought would be an exercise in self-betterment turned out to be
something a little bigger,² he said dryly.