Store Front: New York’s Disappearing Face

Last week, we watched a poignant short documentary about how one British barber is handling the slow demise of his business, driven by the changing face of the modern city. His was one of many voices that reflect the bittersweet aftertaste as “progress” as it touches, and invariably changes, commerce and community. In Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York, photographer duo James and Karla Murray bring the same lens of retrostalgia to New York City’s morphing landscape of mom-and-pop shops. For eight years, the Murrays shot the facades of hundred of stores, more than half of which are now gone.

From the retrotastic typographic signage to the beautiful vintage color schemes, these storefronts are priceless time-capsules of an era as faded as their paint coats, haunting ghosts caught in the machine of progress.

Ideal Hoisery, Grand Street at Ludlow, Manhattan (2004)

Image courtesy of James and Karla Murray / Newsweek

Katy's Candy Store, Tompkins Avenue near Vernon Avenue, Brooklyn (2004)

Image courtesy of James and Karla Murray / Newsweek

Giovani Esposito & Sons Pork Shop, Ninth Avenue at West 39th Street, Manhattan (2004)

Image courtesy of James and Karla Murray / Newsweek

Ideal Dinettes, Knickerbocker Avenue near DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn (2004)

Image courtesy of James and Karla Murray / Newsweek

Maries Beauty Lounge, Morris Park Avenue near Haight Avenue, The Bronx (2004)

Image courtesy of James and Karla Murray / Newsweek

We were shooting graffiti around the five boroughs and were always into the letters of graffiti, so we started to notice these signs have a lot of different interesting fonts. And we liked the stores themselves, but we’d come back and shoot the walls, because in graffiti, a lot of the walls are painted over and over, and we noticed the stores were gone.” ~ Jim Murphy

Brand's Wine & Liquors, West 145th Street near Broadway, Manhattan (2004)

Image courtesy of James and Karla Murray / Newsweek

Walters Hardware Co., Broadway near 36th Street, Queens (2006)

Image courtesy of James and Karla Murray / Newsweek

Erney's Bike Shop, East 17th Street near Third Avenue, Manhattan (2003)

Image courtesy of James and Karla Murray / Newsweek

Miller's for Prescriptions, Broad Street near Cedar Street, Staten Island (2005)

Image courtesy of James and Karla Murray / Newsweek

Nissan Seafood Wholesale, Madison Street at Catherine Street, Manhattan (2005)

Image courtesy of James and Karla Murray / Newsweek

Store Front is equal parts design candy, feat of documentary photography, and visual study in urbanism. For more on the project, Newsweek has a fantastic audio slideshow, featuring wonderful interviews with some of the store owners and the Murrays themselves.

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All the Buildings in New York, Illustrated

What deli signage typography has to do with the connectedness of the universe.

A couple of years ago, illustrator Jason Polan set out to draw every single person in New York City. Now, Australian illustrator and creative nomad James Gulliver Hancock is drawing all the buildings in New York. He started the blog when he first moved to Brooklyn, as a way of getting to know his surroundings and recording his relationship with his new home.

I’ve started to see all the buildings intersect, all the areas locking together. A lot of the drawings seem to reflect this interlocking of manmade structures, i.e. it’s all connected. I started out wanting to hug all the buildings in some autistic reaction to love, awe, shock… but now they are slowly becoming just friends.” ~ James Gulliver Hancock

With his playful style and mix of drawing tools and techniques, from Sharpie-on-notebook to digital illustration to screenprints, Hancock offers a refreshing lens on the world’s most overexposed city, filling it with the kind of childlike wonder so easy to lose amidst New York’s chronic hurry.

In this talk from Harvest HQ’s excellent HOBBY series, Hancock pulls the curtain on his creative process

The interesting thing about drawing is that it makes you look at objects in more detail. Instead of just passing by a building, you realize that there’s this weird little sign and it says these funny things about what the deli sells.” ~ James Gulliver Hancock

Many of Hancock’s lovely drawings are available as prints on the project site. We’re particularly loving the How New York Works one. (Sorry, no direct link — look in the blog’s right sidebar.)

via Quipsologies

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Fifty People, One Question

What world peace has to do with zombie fever and waking up in your own bed.

This past weekend, Vimeo announced the finalists in the first-ever Vimeo Awards for creativity and innovation in online video. While many of our favorites from the past few years made the cut, today we’re looking at one particularly wonderful project: Fifty People One Question.

The brainchild of filmmaker and designer duo Benjamin Reece and Nathan Heleine, the project is based on a simple premise that yields surprisingly rich results: Asking people one question and filming their response.

The project consists of four films, the first of which was shot in New Orleans and conceived by Reece, who later partnered with Heleine to produce the remaining three.

It’s amazing, in a deeply sad kind of way, how self-conscious and timid people become as they communicate a genuine wish for “world peace,” fully aware of the contrived fluff-status the phrase has attained. How disheartening to think that we’ve built ourselves a culture where the prospect of world peace is met with more cynicism than optimism and relayed with more self-derision than bold advocacy.

Filmed in 2008, the project is both brilliantly timeless in its honest humanity and curiously timestamped by the cultural fads and patterns of the day, from the bugeye sunglasses to the dawn of the zombie craze to the common concerns about joblessness at the peak of the economic meltdown.

Where would you like to wake up tomorrow?

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