Old Signs

I started photographing old signs because I live in a town where I am not from.  While this is not  a problem depending on the town?  In this town it is an issue.  When someone asks you where you went to school, they mean high school, and not because people don't go to college in this town, but because high school is a convenient way to quickly connect to generational systems of family and friends. 

I went to a tiny Baptist Fundamentalist school in Fruitport Michigan that closed a year after I graduated (no causal attribution), so answering this question in the right way was impossible.

I started photographing old signs because I thought:  I could create an online archive of old signs and people would share all the associations and stories that came flooding back to them and then because I knew at least, I would belong.

An alternate explanation is that I started photographing old signs because technology arrived at a certain point where it was cheap and simple to take any picture you ever thought might interest you.  This had not been the case before.  Pictures started out as very rare difficult artifacts to create, manage and distribute.  I just happen to come along at a moment where it was so so easy to collect these signifiers of a long ago past that only vaguely reminded people of the values for which the signs had originally stood. 

Eventually my collection of old signs led me to find out about the places, the people and the dreams that were here when they were originally built.  A long time into the process of building "Signs of Canton"  I started recognizing people having these strong affective responses to the signs.  The connection to feelings and memories superceded the stories I had originally hoped to collect.  And bearing witness to these sensations didn't draw me any closer to the place nor make me any more bona fide, but it suddenly felt like a way to live well in public and a way to keep one eye open to the (almost) invisible past.

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