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Ghost signs, ghost ads & other phantoms

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-04

Mar 4th, 2012
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These Wonderful Vintage New York Ad Murals Are Still Trying To Sell Us Things From The 1800’s – BusinessInsider.com

Mar 1st, 2012
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All over the city, ads can still be seen that were first painted in the late 1800s or early 1900s. Often they sell goods that no longer exist (horse carriage repairs) or promote once-famous but extinct brands that recall a simpler time (Uneeda Biscuits).

Jump, 37 at the time he began shooting fading ad murals, felt a kinship with the images because in 1984 he had been diagnosed with HIV, at the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when most people with the disease soon died. “I am photographing these images that I never expected to live so long, and I never expected to live so long,” he told us. – Jim Edwards

Read more: Business Insider

R.H. Macy’s Uptown Stables at West 148th Street, Harlem. Ad circa 1900s. Macy's would have used the stables to make delivery orders telegraphed to it from the 34th Street store.

These Wonderful Vintage New York Ad Murals Are Still Trying To Sell Us Things From The 1800’s – BusinessInsider.com.

Hand-painted Faux Show Cards, Wheatpastes & Woody Guthrie the Sign-Painter

Feb 28th, 2012
by fadingad.
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Contrary to popular mythology, it was with paint brushes in hand, not a guitar, that [Woody] Guthrie hit the road for California. He had hocked his guitar . . . and it was his artistic skills that he brokered for room and board. –Nora Guthrie

For Woody Guthrie dot org © Shepard Fairey, Obey Giant

I’ve had more than my share of time on my hands the last few days – off my feet due to an accident – and I’ve been watching Turner Classics. We watched back-to-back The Grapes of Wrath, based on Steinbeck’s brutal retelling of the Dustbowl era and how big industry exploited American migrant workers during our great economic catastrophe (sound familiar?), and Bound For Glory, the story of Woody Guthrie’s phenomenal yet  humble beginnings of an illustrious career played quite convincingly by David Carradine. During both films, the stark reality of how history repeats itself was made evident – and now yet again the American majority is being exploited by bailed-out banking institutions and holier-than-thou conservative politicians.

Woody Guthrie: Art Works - Rizzoli Books - Authors Steven Brower & Nora Guthrie

As I went walking I saw a sign there – And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.” – But on the other side it didn’t say nothing, – That side was made for you and me. – Alternative verse from This Land is Your Land – Woodie Guthrie

Woody’s first chosen pursuit was painting illustrations and text — he painted signs for businesses to earn a living as a young man before his music became the wellspring of his legacy. As powerful as music can be as medium for social change, the melding of slogans & graphic images has been a powerful and enduring propagandistic tool for both worthy and misguided causes. From Shepard Fairey‘s brilliant Obama Hope Campaign posters to the early hand-painted wall ads for tobacco companies, text and image has been used to persuade, convert, or pervert the masses. Naturally, I was delighted to see Fairey’s “exquisite print” he created for Guthrie’s centennial as a fundraiser when I went to the Official Guthrie Website after seeing the film of his early life. Yet even the simplest urging from a handcrafted store sign or for a sale generated by a stylistic grocery store show card can stop you in your tracks and send you down the aisle looking for a circular coupon. On the Kaufmann Mercantile blog the art of the “snappers,” the slang term that was used to call sign painters, is celebrated and analyzed.

Mixed type and tense lines. From Simplified Show Card Writing, Carl Rousseau Havighorst, 1942 via The Annie Show via Newhouse Books- Kaufmann Mercantile CLICK FOR LINK

Below are the works of who I believe to be a single anonymous snapper who has been posting show cards with wheat paste for ironic and dubious products at bargain prices from the shores of the Gowanus to the wigwams of Tacoma over the last eight years. No clue as to who he or she is but would love to give a proper artists’ credit to the creator of these humors ads with the stylish fonts.

Tacoma Faux Show Card Wheatpaste - Previously posted 8-27-2009 - © Frank H. Jump

Myrtle & Bedford Avenues in August 2005 - Previously posted on FAB on May 4, 2008

Sunset Park Industrial - Hamilton Ave - Previously posted on February 20, 2008 © Frank H. Jump

Other wheatpaste mural art:

Woody Guthrie sites of interest:

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-26

Feb 26th, 2012
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Ghost signs from Vancouver’s past spring up to haunt us still

Feb 25th, 2012
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Ghost signs from Vancouver’s past spring up to haunt us still.

BY JOHN MACKIE, VANCOUVER SUN FEBRUARY 23, 2012

VANCOUVER — Ninety years after it was covered up by a building, a “ghost sign” for a 1922 movie has reappeared at Granville and Robson.

The sign promotes the Harold Lloyd comedy Grandma’s Boy, which played at the Capitol theatre Oct. 2-7, 1922.

The sign is painted onto the north wall of the Power block at 817 Granville, across the street from where the Capitol opened in 1921. Hence the sign includes a red circle reading “Capitol over there,” and features a wonderful disembodied hand with a finger pointing across the street.

Katz & Tauber – Cosmetics, Shaving Supplies, Toothpaste & Oral (?) Preparations – Avenue N – Flatlands, Brooklyn

Feb 21st, 2012
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© Vincenzo Aiosa

© Vincenzo Aiosa

© Vincenzo Aiosa

© Vincenzo Aiosa

© Vincenzo Aiosa

Elsewhere on the Internet:

Auto Alley – East Cermak & South Indiana – Chicago, IL

Feb 20th, 2012
by Frank.
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© Frank H. Jump

© Vincenzo Aiosa

© Vincenzo Aiosa

Fading Ads of New York City | WFUV Radio

Feb 19th, 2012
by Frank.
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Fading Ads of New York City

From Fading Ads of New York City - History Press © Frank H. Jump

Photographer Frank Jump documents NYC’s “ghost signs.”

By George Bodarky 
Saturday, February 18, 2012 – 7:30am

New York City’s saturated with advertisements.  They’re on buses, in the subways, atop taxis, and along highways.  But, it’s not the newest Calvin Klein ad that catches the attention of acclaimed photographer and urban documentarian Frank Jump.

He likes to document so-called ghost signs in the city.  These ads from a bygone era are visible, but often overlooked — and for Jump, they’re also a metaphor for his own long survival with HIV.  Several of Jump’s photographs are included in a new book called Fading Ads of New York City. Jump is our guest on this week’s Cityscape.

Listen Here

Fading Ads of New York City | WFUV Radio.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-19

Feb 19th, 2012
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Looking Up to Look Back: The Fading Ads of New York – WFUV-WNET – MetroFocus

Feb 18th, 2012
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BOOKS

Looking Up to Look Back: The Fading Ads of New York

George Bodarky and Sarah Berson | February 17, 2012 4:04 AM
Author: Frank Jump
Publisher: The History Press
Publication Date: Nov. 2011

In 1986, when Frank Jump was 26 years old, he was diagnosed as HIV positive. It was a time when doctors still knew little of the disease. They estimated Jump only had a few years left to live.

The doctors were wrong. Nearly 10 years after his diagnosis, things started looking up for Jump — literally.

In 1997, he “discovered” an ad for Omega Oil, a cure-all tonic, painted on the side of a New York City building. It was the beginning of a quest to photograph old ads painted or glued to the sides of city buildings, ads he views as relics of New York’s past. The quest has consumed Jump ever since.

“New York is a never-ending process,” Jump explained in an interview with WFUV’s Cityscape. “Building and reconstruction and renovation of New York is constant. As new buildings go up and old buildings come down, there’s going to be new ads revealed. It’s exciting to watch. I think this will be something I do until the day I die.”

Jump has displayed his collection of photographs of faded ads in museums and recently compiled them into a book, “Fading Ads of New York City.”

As Jump entered his second decade with HIV, he said that the decaying ads came to represent the friends he lost to AIDS. “I’ve watched many, many, many, many people die. I even have address books with telephone numbers that I just stapled shut because everybody in it was gone,” said Jump.

Click below to hear Cityscape host George Bodarky’s interview with Frank Jump about the fading ads project:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The artists who painted the ads, some of which go back to the late 19th century, were called “wall dogs.” When Jump began publishing photographs of the ads on his blog, fadingad.com, several of the “wall dogs” contacted him from their nursing homes.

Jump, who is now 52, will stop at nothing in his quest to shoot the ads. He has scaled rickety fire escapes, pulled over on busy highways and walked along elevated train tracks. Jump admits to faking appointments in certain buildings to get up to the roof and even outrunning guard dogs to get the right angle in the right light.

“This book tells two stories,” wrote Dr. Andrew Irving, an anthropologist, in the book’s foreward. “That of New York City and its obsession with money, advertising and renewal over the last 150 years; and the story of the life of a teacher and photographer who has dedicated much of his time to documenting and archiving the hundreds of gigantic advertisements that were painted, often by hand, on the sides of walls and buildings.” Jump feels that the faded ads open a window into the New York of yesteryear and can change the way we see the city.

Does Jump think the city should restore the ads to their former glory? He says no. Just like every living thing, they were meant to fade away — or be torn down unexpectedly.

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