From A to Big Apple

Cary Building (King & Kellum, 1857) 105–107 Chambers Street. Cast iron facade, including the lettering, by D.D. Badger’s Architectural Ironworks.

For nearly 30 years, I have been photographing lettering I see during the course of my daily ramblings in New York. Until last year, the process had been random, driven by the vagaries of where I was, what happened to catch my attention, and whether or not I had my camera—originally a heavy Nikon FE7 and later a lightweight Olympus—with me. But in 2005—spurred initially by the purchase of a digital SLR camera and then increasingly by alarm at the destruction that has accompanied the frantic pace of condo-ization in Manhattan—I began to systematically record the lettering of New York. Continue reading.