Additionally, I will be doing some work on signage as an extra task because it's similar and comes under street photography. I came across Walker Evans who has a published book called signs which has his greatest photographs. His fascination with signs resulted in some photographs of billboards, movie posters, street signs - signs of all kinds and the people and places around them. It's similar to what I'm doing with candid photography but in more depth focusing more on the signs and lettering. The photographs in the book was from the 1930's which I find fascinating because it's archived styled so a lot of these images are records of American life over 50 years, places like New York City and Chicago won't be the same as how we would see it now. Here is an image of Walker Evan's below.
This photograph was taken in New York City and it's workers loading a neon sign that says Damaged into the truck. It was taken on film and I think the quality is really good. Walker has shot this physical sign that was being held by people so I see how it fitted with what he was fascinated to shoot about. Moreover on the technical side, I love how clear the image looks with the black and white and it's very high in contrast. I think I'm also inspired with how most of his images look similar with the way it's all strong contrasted black and white. It's also bright and the white colour looks very clean. Usually, black and white film is faded and lacks that punch of contrast but these look very contemporary up until now.
So after looking at a few examples of Walker Evan's work, I have been inspired to shoot my own images and then edit them in a similar way. It would be interesting if these images had purpose if they were seen years and years later, like how we're looking back at these archived images. Here are my contact prints:
Whilst doing this shoot, I travelled to Leeds and Bradford to just focus on signs but of course I didn't find no sign being loaded into a truck. I did get some digital images in colour which I've edited to relate my images to my inspiration. Here are my images:
This image was shot in Leeds and I captured the shop signs, the reason I shot this was because all these shops were jewellers or watch shops so I thought that was a cool common theme. I have also edited this like Walker's work so it's strong and bold with contrast. All these shop signs are different and use different fonts so I thought it's interesting to see them together and how some appeal to someone more than the others. The clock designs that are up is quite cool and I think seeing that in many years later would be interesting because who knows what the future may hold - these shop signs can become like a digital screen.
On a pillar, there was all these posters of events so I thought of getting a close up shot of the signs. I think by doing this, it gives it more of an abstract effect because you can't see the full posters but you can see how they're all stuck up. I think the black and white effect in this image makes it all collated like the posters were similar coloured but I quite like making it into one. The Alec Sloth poster actually stands out more because of the lettering here, and I like how all the typography in this image is different which differs each poster from each other.
This is another wall that had all these posters stuck up which I thought of capturing from a distance. Along with that, there's also the graffiti above the posters. I quite like how the lines make up the image here because it was taken straight ahead so you can see how the roads being uphill makes the image stand out more. I think the ripped poster in the corner stands out to me because the others are all clear and then you have this ripped poster which gives the wall more effect in the photograph.
In this image, I was aiming to focus this on the open sign that is hanging above the door but the white sign above is overpowering that transparent sign. I thought it was cool how the windows are clustered with text everywhere and there's deals everywhere. I don't know as to why, but this image just reminds me of a different country. As the shop is Nigerian cuisine, it just looks very traditional with the open sign.
Last but not least is this image that was taken on my iPhone because I wasn't carrying my SLR at the time. I came across this shop sign that was on the floor, and this reminded me of the example I used of Walker Evan's image. I like the edit on the image because it looks very sharp and gritty. I think this effect is related to the sign because it's about roofing contractors. I find it quite funny that a roofing contractor sign was just left on the floor, on the pedestrian pavement.
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