I love living downtown and I love creating street photography. Ever since early 2020, I’ve been walking around the local neighborhoods with my camera almost daily.
Lately, I’m really interested in capturing the sort of natural deconstruction of these street posters I see around the Historic District and other neighborhoods. They begin their lifecycle as promotional tools for brands, products, and events, and over the days and weeks after they’re first mounted, the street leaves it’s mark, from tags and graffiti to political messaging and just random destruction.
The main area where I’ve been capturing most of these posters is on the old Hamburgers/May Company building on 8th Street between Broadway and Hill. The building is boarded up on all three street-facding sides, and people have been putting up posters there for years.
Now, here’s the angle that really intrigues me. New posters are pasted up once or twice a week, and someone makes a regular thing of tearing them and ripping parts of them off. I’m really curious about this – who’s doing this? Is it one person who hates these posters? Is it just random people tearing at them? Who knows? It feels like a sort of serendipitous collaboration between strangers.
This all creates a kind of urban magic – sometimes I think of these pieces like reading tea leaves – this random, chaotic composition of random images and phyiscal interaction that create unique visuals that resonate with their own little messages from the street.
A random observation from doing street photography in general – most people are civilized. Sometimes I’ll get caught up in finding a composition and take a few moments to explore, and I won’t notice someone was coming up behind me to walk past, but has paused to wait for me to finish getting ths shot.
These boarded-up walls create this kind of living art gallery, where the display changes regularly, a little or a lot, but it’s always different, and I just find that incredibly compelling and kind of magical.