[The cover photo depicts Untitled (America/Me), a work by artist Glenn Ligont. Adjacent to the High Line at 18th Street and 10th Avenue, the work is on display through November 2024.]

Yes, New York City has jazz clubs, theater, restaurants, bookstores, museums, and iconic landmarks, but for me, the city is its streets. On a typical day, I walk at least 10 miles, occasionally extending my trek to 14 or 15 miles. I always carry a camera, or two with me.

For many, Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, Bruce Gilden, and Garry Winogrand epitomize street photography, but I don’t consider myself a classic street photographer, at least if street photography entails capturing people as they embarrass themselves, or reveal their humanity through comedic, tender, or heroic acts. My interest is in architectural details, light and shadows, and ‘signage.’ To the extent I photograph people, they almost always are involved in intentional activity—playing music, busking, demonstrating, or engaging in sport or other group activities.

‘Signage’ takes many forms, including graffiti tags, posters affixed with paste to construction site plywood fencing, aphorisms scribbled or stenciled on sidewalks, billboards, store windows, memorials to dead celebrities, flags, public art, holiday decorations, and stickers plastered on traffic signs and light poles, often obscuring messages directed at motorists (e.g., one-way street). Some signage is paid-for brand advertising; other signage is impromptu political or social messaging. What I often see is the work of an otherwise unknown person hoping his voice rises above the urban din.

I photograph as a documentarian. Signage reveals as much about us and our times as it does about whoever creates and displays it. Doubt my assessment, then look at images of Times Square from the Fifties or Sixties. Sometimes a great photograph requires the passage of time before it reveals itself (ripens).

During a typical day, I encounter thousands of people, some sitting in parks, others sleeping on benches, some engaged in seasonal activity, others shopping, and many just scurrying to their next destination. Most don’t consciously perceive the signage scattered high and low. But the city’s denizens nevertheless absorb the disparate messages, subliminally shaping their moods and beliefs, letter by letter, word by word, symbol by symbol, image by image. Only through my camera’s viewfinder am I able to decipher the resulting dialogues, sometimes between the signs, and sometimes between the signs and me.

This week, I sense anxiety. Conveniently, Halloween 2024 falls just five days before Tuesday’s (or more likely, Wednesday’s) great reveal. Will the sharply divided populace choose Donald J. Trump or Kamala Harris?

Chucky, the Joker, Freddie Kruger, and the Killer Clown offer a momentary respite from the non-stop onslaught of campaign ads, debates, town halls, and the endless commentary. Scary, but we derive pleasure—and maybe some comfort—from familiar fake killer clowns and serial killers.

Time is better spent watching Bugs Bunny cartoons than CNN’s evening lineup of stupefying panels. After two years, everyone—be they Harris or Trump supporters— has had enough. Just end it

This is the fourth consecutive year that I have covered the Village Halloween parade. Compared with prior years, this October there were more costumed revelers, more decorations, and more good-natured silliness produced by what is now an adult holiday—I read an article last week reporting that several towns now prohibit people over a specified age from trick or treating. Want a Tootsie Roll or a baggie filled with candy corn? if you are over 18, you must now steal it from the kid clutching his jack o’ lantern pail.

Yet, the narcotic-like state induced by the masks, props, and facepaint, came to a quick end Friday morning (or afternoon) when people rolled out of bed or rose slowly from the floor, where they had collapsed earlier. The juxtaposition of Halloween and the election highlights our collective anxiety.

But setting aside this week’s particulars, whenever walking the streets, photographing signage, I realize that the much of what I photograph is symptomatic of social media’s broken promise. Facebook, Substack, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and even Truth Social each offer a free platform for expression. No expensive printing presses or elaborate distribution networks required. Just a username and password stand between Joe Schmo’s pithy thoughts and the rest of us, whether his wisdom is encapsulated in text, audio, video, or still imagery.

While influencers who pursue social media full-time and celebrities often garner millions of followers and ‘Likes,” most of us lack such reach, so we end up voicing our views to a few friends or just to ourselves. Apparently, those intent on sharing their wisdom with mankind have concluded that the streets offer a physical alternative to Instagram.

Just look around when stepping out. The memes, pleas for kindness or companionship, commentary on Trump, Harris and other politicians, and hard sells are everywhere—all efforts to be seen and heard. Would there be so much signage on the street if social media worked for everyone?

Doubt me? Stop looking down as your hand clutches a screen while moving through the city’s streets. The city is Instagram in 3D. No need to scroll with fingers. Just push forward, but don’t lose sight of the fact that the city existed long before Instagram. While corporations have always used city walls to advertise, the rest of us never viewed it as a canvas for personal expression. Many of the recent forms of signage I encounter are a recent phenomenon.

[The images displayed below are grouped into categories. I will provide my thoughts at the end of each grouping. In keeping with how messages present themselves on the street, I have deliberately included random images that do not fall within the category being addressed.

Hanging Paper

Several years ago, on a Friday afternoon, I ran into two young guys pasting posters on construction site plywood fencing. They asked me not to photograph them because what they were doing was illegal. I accept their legal opinion, but I am not sure why posting bills should be illegal. The advertising and social commentary is far more interesting and colorful than an empty wall comprised of warped plywood. See NYC Construction Code §3307.4.6, which prohibits the posting of any sign, information, pictorial representation, business or advertising message to any protective structure other than required by law. Clearly honored in the breach.

The police obviously aren’t interested in enforcing restrictions on “hanging paper.” Most posters contain identifying information, permitting the police to track down the person who hired the hangers if the police wanted to expend the effort, but I never have heard of any record company, musician, club, or consumer products company running afoul of the law.

The two hangers told me that there are two competing companies that place the posters—no poster appears by accident. The hangers from the two competitors play a form of ‘tag’ with each other, taking great delight in covering a poster hung by the competing company. Take a close look at a poster on a construction site wall—there can be one to two inches of now obsolete posters behind the currently visible one.

If you ever see a poster that you want to memorialize with a photograph, do it then and there. One morning, I went to breakfast without taking a camera (big mistake). On my return to the hotel, I saw a poster that had gone up while I was at breakfast for an exhibit featuring photographer Cindy Sherman’s work. An adjacent poster was in dialogue with the Sherman poster. I immediately headed to my room, retrieved my camera, and then headed back out, only to discover that hangers from the competing company had already superimposed a new poster over the Sherman poster.

Several trips back, I did finally surreptitiously capture an image of two poster hangers at work.

A Lost Art Rejuvenated: Hand-Painted Signs

About a year ago, I noticed two guys up on a hydraulic lift painting the side of a brick building as they completed an ad for a premium liquor brand. The light was bad, so the photographs did not do the painters justice. On this trip, I noticed three hydraulic lifts as I headed to breakfast at Jack’s Wife Freda, where I go each morning when in New York City—Greek yogurt, granola, honey, and grapefruit slices, together with coffee and sourdough toast.

Two painters were just finishing an advertisement for White Claw Hard Seltzer; the other two groups were working on signs for Prada and Widow Jane Bourbon, all premium brands demanding eye-catching advertisements. Each company behind the brands could easily affix a vinyl banner to the building’s side for, according to a 2018 article in the New York Times, half the cost, but they chose hand-crafted signage, with its DIY hipster vibe.

The company behind much of the hand-painted signage is Colossal Media. Founded in 2004 by Paul Lindahl, Adrian Moeller, and Patrick Elasik, Colossal began operations in a one-car garage in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Prior to starting Colossal, Lindahl was a drummer and skater, who made stencils for another company, but who found himself unemployed following an arrest. His offense, not surprisingly, painting graffiti. From those humble beginnings, Colossal has grown, now painting ads on more 500 walls each year.

The painters—known as “Wall Dogs”—produce the visible work, but those back in Colossal’s office are engaged in a highly specialized real estate business. The company’s website advises building owners:

As the leader in hand-painted wallscapes, we are able to offer the most competitive rental rates in the industry. If you feel that you have a location with potential, please contact us immediately and we will arrange for a site visit.

That same page includes a map, revealing that Colossal also creates its unique ads in Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco.

According to a Colossal Media photographer who I met while he photographed the same ads I was photographing, each sign typical requires a week from start to finish, but I suspect in some cases the process requires much more time. Several blocks north, just south of the intersection of Lafayette and Prince Streets, there is a building that always has noteworthy painted signage. Currently, there is an ad for Gucci that fills half the building’s side wall with a Nan Goldin photograph of Debra Harry entitled, We Will Always Have London. Two years ago, that same wall revealed a spot-on depiction of a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Another ad for Gucci.

Stencilling and Scribbling on Sidewalks

Look down as you walk. You will see stencils advertising new albums, expressing political sentiments, or offering pithy, at least in the eyes of the author, life advice. I detest this signage. It is essentially sidewalk litter. Everyone complains when a dog owner doesn’t scoop up the sidewalk deposit left by the owner’s dog. Are these scribbles and stencils any different?

Long after the concert or election is over, this visual flotsam remains. It may be ephemeral in the minds of those who quickly walk over it, but it is anything but ephemeral as a mark. At least with the posters hung on plywood walls, another poster will soon cover it. Eventually the construction project comes to an end. The plywood and the posters then vanish.

It takes years before the sidewalk graffiti vanishes. How many times must the sidewalk be salted after snowstorms before the stencil is gone? How hard must the rain fall to wash away the paint or ink?

Lady Gaga, her record company, or a streamer has liberally applied stencils to the sidewalks of SoHo. Gaga has over 58 million Instagram followers. Why must our eyes be subjected to an ad for her latest song, which will be forgotten a month from now? Does she pay the City of New York an advertising fee?

Public Art Poses Many Questions While Simultaneously Providing an Instagrammable Moment

Public art speaks for itself. To get a building variance, the developer may have agreed to include a piece of public art in a skyscraper’s plaza. Or a commission comprised of the wealthy and art experts may have advised the city on what art should be included in a park.

The art often is whimsical or raises non-controversial questions. Tourists have always posed for snapshots in front of these civic monuments. During the last 15 years, public art has become Instagrammable, attracting the influencers. I am not a fan of photographing artwork, but if I do want a photographic memento, I may have to wait 10 or 15 minutes before I can capture the image without people snapping selfies.

Home Owners and Apartment Dwellers Send Messages

Many homeowners and apartment dwellers express themselves using their front yards, entranceways, and facades as canvases for expression. Given the convergence of Halloween and the 2024 election, some homeowners in the West Village were playful, welcoming skeletons, witches, and other creatures as de facto house guests, while others focused on the election. One brownstone owner was even hopeful about the Yankees chances in the 5th Game of the World Series later in the day. Down 3-1, I was not as hopeful.

Anyone who is in New York City during the Halloween season should take a walk through the West Village. Many homeowners take great delight in prepping their homes for trick or treaters. I have yet to see a smashed pumpkin. There are plenty of unique coffee houses, cafes, and bars throughout the neighborhood to facilitate rehydration during a journey that can easily take three or four hours.

At least one homeowner revealed her anxiety over the election’s outcome, using the facade of her home to meld Halloween and politics: A woman’s hands held a cat, picking up on the theme of this year’s Village Halloween Parade, Cat Ladies Unite: Meow. We won’t know for a few days just how many and just how united J.D. Vance’s childless cat ladies are.

Of course, the big hit was the Ghostbusters-themed $45 million single-family residence at 27 Christopher Street. People stopped in their tracks, including delivery drivers and Streets and Sanitation workers. Everyone snapped photographs of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man on the rooftop, a 25-foot-wide spider web occupying the southeast corner of the building, and four-legged growling beasts standing on pedestals at street level. The world is unable to forget pop culture phenomena coming out of Hollywood. People repurpose the characters, symbols, and trademarks whenever the opportunity presents itself. Later that day, several Ghostbusters walked the parade route, alongside two Ghostbuster vehicles.

Some Create Stickers to Easily Spread Messages

Like many others, I order my business cards from Moo.com. In addition to business cards, Moo offers inexpensive customized stickers to order. 50 shine-free 2.17” x 3.3” or 3” x 4” stickers for just $22. Some businesses use them to brand shipping boxes, but as too many light poles and police call boxes can attest, many people liberally deploy the stickers throughout the city, although I don’t know whether Moo.com is the source.

Like sidewalk stencils, I detest the stickers even though each one is a small sign carrying a message. Too often they simply serve as advertisements for the services and work produced by creative types. In many cases, the intended message is undecipherable, most likely directed to a small group in the know. An inside joke.

I encounter stickers every day in Chicago, often affixed to traffic signs. One “Tow Zone” sign that I pass frequently is totally obscured, potentially producing a nasty surprise for the motorist when he returns to where he thought he had parked his car. Just last week, I walked past a one-way sign that had been completely encased in stickers. After many months, the city had replaced the illegible sign. The first sticker will undoubtedly be applied to the new canvas within days.

Fans Memorializing Dead Celebrities

Last year when I was in New York City for Halloween, the populace was dealing with the sudden, but not entirely unexpected death of Matthew Perry. Outside of the West Village apartment building at 90 Bedford Street where the fictional characters resided, hordes of fans and gawkers gathered in front of an ever-growing pile of flower bouquets and hand-scrawled sympathy cards. Traffic creeped slowly through the intersection. To Perry’s credit, Chandler Bing became a lifelong friend to many standing in the street.

A year later, cutting through Washington Square Park, I discovered a similar memorial abutting the stone archway. The memorial for One Direction’s Liam Payne, who had fallen or jumped out of a window two weeks earlier, was a bit shopworn, but largely identical to the one commemorating Perry’s life. Same cellophane-encased bouquets, same heartfelt messages claiming that the author could have saved the star, and the same wax drippings, now hardened on the surrounding pavement and other mementos.

Celebrities serve as a diversion from otherwise mundane lives, creating dreams and fantasies. Or in the words of French philosopher Blaise Pascal,

He who does not see the vanity of the world is himself very vain. Indeed who do not see it but youths who are absorbed in fame, diversion, and the thought of the future? But take away diversion, and you will see them dried up with weariness. They feel then their nothingness without knowing it; for it is indeed to be unhappy to be in insufferable sadness as soon as we are reduced to thinking of self and have no diversion.

If our condition were truly happy, we not need diversion from thinking of it in order to make ourselves happy.

Death is easier to bear without thinking of it than is the thought of death without peril

Pascal, Pensées 166, 167, and 167 (1660).

Ironically, celebrating a celebrity following his death serves as another diversion, while simultaneously reminding us that death awaits everyone despite the diversions we use to anesthetized ourselves.

Payne and Perry are the recent visible manifestations of this phenomenon, but the city offers plenty of opportunities to remember. On Saturday, I found myself at Central Park’s Strawberry Fields, the memorial created by Yoko Ono to honor her late husband, John Lennon. As is typical, a musician was singing songs written by Lennon, as people sat on the benches surrounding the Imagine memorial circle, which was filled with orange pedals forming a Peace symbol.

Earlier in the week, I stopped to photograph a brownstone in the Village that displayed a Ukrainian flag and a Harris/Walz sign. I couldn’t figure out why a bunch of young women were taking selfies in front of the door-stoop—I didn’t think they were memorializing the Ukrainian flag. When I asked, I received puzzled looks. After all, this was where Carrie Bradshaw, the protagonist in the HBO series, Sex and the City, lived. One woman was shocked that I had never seen an episode. Another of Pascal’s diversions. The actress who played Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker, is very much alive, residing nearby.

Thirty years ago, I interviewed a law student at NYU who was seeking a job. Trying to set him at ease—he was a hot mess—I asked what he liked to do in his free time. A bit reluctantly, he fessed up: He visited sites where notable people had died. One of his recent visits was to the Chelsea Hotel, where Nancy Spungen, Sid Vicious’s girlfriend, was stabbed to death with a Jaguar K-11 hunting knife purchased by Vicious a few days earlier. Vicious was the frontman for the legendary U.K. punk rockers, the Sex Pistols. While out on bail, Vicious died of a heroin overdose on February 1, 1979. Anne Beverly later produced a note that she claimed Vicious wrote stating that he and Spungen had entered into a suicide pact. Some believe Vicious fulfilled his end of the bargain with what was an intentional overdose.

For the law student, his visit the Chelsea Hotel (and other notable sites) were just another of Pascal’s diversions.

I must confess. Several trips back, I took my own diversion, visiting Taylor Swift’s Tribeca residence early one Saturday morning. Surprisingly, no fans were out front, but an older woman looked at me while I was photographing the facade, and said, “Not you, too.” She must live nearby.

Miscellaneous Signs and Messages

For some reason, as I was walking north from Bryant Park, where I had watched the ice skaters circling the winter rink, Holden Caulfield popped into my mind. Caulfield is J.D. Salinger’s protagonist in the Catcher in the Rye, a novel I read as a sophomore in high school. Apparently, the ice skaters had triggered my recollection. In Chapter 17 of the book, Holden and Sally—the girl Holden hopes will run off with him to Vermont—go ice skating at Radio City after seeing a play.

As I walked, I recalled the trope underlying the novel’s title. Was someone going to catch all the people anxious about Tuesday’s election before they went off the cliff? Was I the catcher in the rye?

Copyright 2024, Jack B. Siegel. All Rights Reserved. Do Not Alter, Copy, Display, Distribute, Download, Duplicate, or Reproduce Without the Prior Written Consent of the Copyright Holder.