NEW YORK—Famed photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975) saw the beauty in New York City’s “ghost ads.” The once brilliantly colored paintings advertising all sorts of obsolete wares—like a fig and syrup children’s laxative—now fading into the cityscape.
Evans shot some of the fading murals of his day, and a new generation of artists now captures the fading works, often delving into the stories behind them.
Brooklyn photographer Frank Jump began documenting what he calls the city’s “fading ads” after he learned in 1986 that he was HIV positive.
“I was documenting something that never expected to live so long, and I didn’t expect to live so long,” said Jump, who has compiled his work into a book titled “Fading Ads of New York City.”
The lead-based paint, regulated into obsolescence these days, clings to the buildings sides the way no paint today could. In some cases, the paintings have outlived the products they advertise, and the ads chronicle the history of the city from a different perspective.
