I Saw The Sign

I Saw The Sign is a project I started instinctively when I first got access to a digital camera. As a former professional sign painter and sign maker, I’ve been obsessed with signs my entire adult life. I see signs as artefacts at the center of stories: most signs are the result of something that happened, with someone deciding that the solution to the thing that happened was to create a sign to warn other people about it. Almost every time I see a sign, I can’t help but stop and think about how and why these particular words–or images, or combination of words & images–came to be posted in this specific location.

Some signs are examples of people or corporations protecting themselves or their property. Others are personal notes, from one person to a very specific person or group of people: relics of interpersonal drama. Some signs simply say bizarre things, especially when taken out of context. Signs are often windows into local cultures. More often than you’d think, signs contain misspellings or misused punctuation which the proofreader in me can’t help but notice – and grimace about. To me, signs (and their more corporatized identity, “signage”) are often overlooked sites of complex communication and, even more often, the embodiment of human absurdity.

I don’t view the photos themselves as art pieces; they aren’t particularly good quality, just informal snapshots. The most important thing to me is keeping a record of the signs, perhaps including enough surrounding visual information to provide extra context for the viewer when necessary. As a creative project, I think of the archive itself being more important than any individual picture in the collection.

There are thousands of photos in I Saw The Sign, and the archive is constantly expanding. I file the photos in a Flickr photo album (yes, that’s how old this project is). Recently I’ve begun trawling through all of my personal photos and adding even more items to the I Saw The Sign album, and decided to formalize it as a distinct project. Ideally I’d like to publish a selection of these sign photos as a book.