‘We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous, but we do not notice it.’ Charles Baudelaire

This long-term project explores the wide range of ways that people write onto the surfaces of the city. It is a documentation of tactics of marking and signaling through varied modes of address, points of information, and forms of expression. These tactics range from highly formal lettering to rapid tagging, artistic flourishes to utilitarian announcements, legally posted signage to haphazard scrawls, incised characters to collagraphic collages.  They may be written onto a substrate and affixed to a building, or they may be applied directly to the surface. In all cases, they charge the architecture and infrastructure of the city to carry additional meaning, to provide signal boosting power for the urban viewshed, to call out to the world around.  

While such texts are abundant, even ubiquitous in some cities, I am interested in those moments when they emerge out of the background noise of everyday urban life and into our consciousness. The ambient texts included here have, in one way or another, exceeded themselves, pushed beyond the amplitude of their signal to reveal something more, or perhaps even less, about the city around them.  These might be set in distinct, isolated spaces or entangled through collision or saturation where meanings are contested, negotiated or unstable. They might be deliberate talismans of corporate capitalist power, such as the dazzling displays of Shibuya Crossing or Times Square. Or they might be a hastily pained reminder not to park in front of someone’s driveway. Behind each is a gesture, a fleeting trace of someone’s time, intent, and labor, often lingering, usually fugitive or lost.

The photographs selected here reflect the range of texts abroad on the surfaces of the city; they are drawn from a collection of several thousand such images. A larger selection of 100 texts can be reviewed on my Flickr page here.  I have occasionally manipulated the images by desaturation and selective re-addition of color, or by cropping, sharpening, digital burning, and dodging, or shifting the white balance. What I hope they do regardless is to reveal the surface of the city as a great palimpsest, roiling with the combinatory possibilities of fonts and styles and characters and letters and words, inscribed and re-inscribed with meaning.

Joseph Heathcott is a writer, artist, curator, and educator based in New York, where he teaches at The New School. Hailing from the rustbelt, Heathcott learned camera work at an early age using his father’s U.S. Army issued 35mm Mamia Sekor TL500. He pursued photography and printmaking as a student at Washington University in the 1980s, and spent several years after college creating agit-prop (posters, flyers, screen prints, ‘zines) for political groups and protest events.  While in graduate school, he worked as a radio producer, museum collections specialist, and youth educator. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies in 2001 from Indiana University.

Heathcott’s work explores metropolitan forms and urban imaginaries within a global perspective. His photography, maps, drawings, and essays have appeared in a wide range of venues, including magazines, exhibits, juried art shows, DIY ‘zines, radio broadcasts, books, and journals of opinion. He held the U.S. Fulbright Distinguished Chair to the United Kingdom at the University of the Arts in London, a Senior Visiting Scholar at the London School of Economics, and a Mellon Distinguished Fellowship in Architecture and Urbanism at Princeton School of Architecture. He has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Vienna and l’École Urbaine at Sciences Po in Pars.

As someone who comes out of an agit-prop tradition, I use photography, collage, drawing, and mapping, as elements of a critical urban practice. The work that comes out of this practice occupies the intersection between documentary and aesthetic impulses, and in doing so it is neither real nor beautiful, but something else.  That ‘something else’ changes from time to time, but might best be described as a trace of something left behind as a condition of living in the city. Ultimately, since the whole of the city is unknowable, I look for it through its traces: the signals, noises, layers, jagged edges, soft wares, connective tissues, ghosts, hoaxes, fetishes, archives, dreams, and buried treasures that tell us something about the ‘urban.’

The oeuvre of Gordon Matta Clark. See Antonio Sergio Bessa et al, Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

The oeuvre of Martha Rosler. See If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism : A Project by Martha Rosler (New York: New Press, 1998).

The oeuvre of Ray Johnson. See Elizabeth Zula et al, Not Nothing (New York: Siglio, 2014)