Manhole covers that left their mark on the city — Ephemeral New York
Looking up at New York’s buildings isn’t the only way to get a sense of the city’s past. Cast your eyes down on the sidewalk and street, and you’ll start seeing an incredible variety of manhole covers—many from the 19th and early 20th centuries. These iron lids serve a utilitarian purpose. But the men who […]
via Manhole covers that left their mark on the city — Ephemeral New York
Middenstead — Liminal Narratives
Middenstead. The ‘place where a dunghill is formed’. This is the dust-heap, the rubbish pile, the flecked land of litter and waste. Here we find the discarded; the despoiled; the contaminated and the forgotten. These are spaces we shun or, more passively, we fail to see. They flicker at the margins of sight. For Shoard, […]
The desert as postmodern metaphor — Andrea Gibbons
Think of how the desert gets turned into metaphor in postmodern rhetoric where it functions as the place of origins, endings and hard truths: the place at the end of the world where all meanings and values blow away; the place without landmarks that can never be mapped; the place where nothing grows and nobody…
Michel de Certeau — The Vale of Soul-Making
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place – an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny […]
Graffiti — cakeordeathsite
Brassaï’s close-ups of graffiti carved and painted on Parisian city walls were first seen in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1933, however he would continue to photograph images of graffiti for the next three decades, culminating in the publication of the book, Graffiti, in 1961. With this project, ‘the eye of Paris’ as he was called […]
Glow — For Earth Below
Macabre — Liminal Narratives
Ghost signs, as we have seen, haunt the margins of many zones. Here, fixed categories blur before our eyes. These faded imprints, inked or carved on shop face or wall, elide past, present, future, materiality, insubstantiality, presence and absence. To those that care to listen, they murmur of long-forgotten brands — cigarettes, flour, razors — […]
Homage to “Manhatta” — For Earth Below
What a tourist saw on a trip to New York in 1970 — Ephemeral New York
In March 1970, a traveler now living in Rotterdam paid a visit to New York City. Jaap Breedveld was in his 40s at the time. Like many tourists, he took photos that reflect the typical itinerary of a sightseer from overseas, like Times Square (above, with the old Howard Johnson’s at 46th Street on the […]
via What a tourist saw on a trip to New York in 1970 — Ephemeral New York
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