Tag Archives: Advertising

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Photo Friday: Occident Flour

My love for painted advertising signs on the sides of brick buildings is well documented here. It’s not unusual for me to yell “Stop the car!” or slow my family on a walk to capture one with a camera. More commonplace in earlier decades, they used blank brick canvasses to sell everything from mining equipment to toothpaste. I love coming upon them on country roadsides and in city alleyways. This bright one near St. Johnsbury, Vermont, was no doubt repainted and lovingly refurbished to its old-timey feel. I don’t think the site is a general store any longer.

I’ve since learned that Occident Flour was produced by the Russell-Miller Milling Company in the midwest from 1894-the early 1950s. It was sold to the Peavey Company in 1962 and acquired by ConAgra in 1982. That trajectory, along with newer advertising methods, partially explains the loss of painted signs for individual concerns.

Have you seen and photographed something unusual, whimsical, beautiful, or otherwise interesting in your travels? Has anything surprised you or caused you to pause? Or have you simply experienced a small, lovely moment that you wanted to capture? If so, I hope you’ll share with us by leaving a comment with a link to your photo. I look forward to seeing it!

 

Photo by Susan Sachs Lipman, Graphic from Occident Flour

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Photo Friday: Ghost Sign
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Photo Friday: Ghost Sign

While in New York (site of last week’s Photo Friday), I became completely entranced with “Ghost Signs”, faded advertising signs painted on the sides of brick buildings. Most of these are from decades ago. Some are faded beyond recognition. Many offer goods and services that have seen more popular times: millinery, lithography, shirtwaists, coatfronts, sewing machines, steam heat, furs and skins, paper and twine.

As I walked around Manhattan’s streets, gazing up and peering around corners for ghost signs, I felt like an urban archeologist. Each sign held a clue to past generations. Each felt like a surprise to discover, as well as a fleeting treat. I knew that the next time I might pass this way, the sign could very well be faded completely, lost to memory — or lost to new construction, as glass and steel might completely cover it up, much the way the tearing down of old buildings to make way for new ones may have led to some of these old ghost signs seeing the light of day once more.

I try to photograph ghost signs wherever I go. I have found New York City and Portland, Oregon, to be especially rich places for them, in addition to forgotten main streets and quiet roads where rural barns advertise tobaccos and colas. Look for an upcoming post that will feature more.

In the meantime, keep observing, wandering, and being open to a surprise or two. Last week reader Alice sent a link to this story on Slow Photography, which is more about the joyful process of taking pictures than it is about the finished result. (Thank you Alice. See Alice’s photos on flickr.)

Have you seen and photographed something unusual, whimsical, beautiful, or otherwise interesting in your travels? Has anything surprised you or caused you to pause? Or have you simply experienced a small, lovely moment that you wanted to capture? If so, I hope you’ll share with us by leaving a comment with a link to your photo. I look forward to seeing it!

Photo by Susan Sachs Lipman

Nostalgia: Then & Now

I just read Stuart Elliot’s April 6 Advertising column in the New York Times, which told me nostalgia is in. Or at least that Madison Avenue has latched onto it as a way to soothe our worries and make us all feel more comfortable in this, our current turbulent time. (And then buy stuff.) Old advertising characters and slogans, and even retro packaging, are being trotted out. It would seem that these ads are intended to evoke nostalgia for past advertising and then, by extension, the times in which it was produced.

According to the piece, though we are a seriously nostalgic people (and nostalgic for periods marked as decades, approximately 20 years after they happen), the last time ad execs paid much attention to this was in the uncertain 70s, when the public was bombarded with images of a supposedly happier time, or at least a time that hearkened back to plenty of people’s childhoods, the 50s.

I sometimes think I’m genetically nostalgic. Though cheery, I’ve always entertained a melancholic streak, an interest in memory, in looking back. An awareness of the fleeting, even as it’s occurring (which can also lead to terrific appreciation.) An inner longing for something that I can only somewhat identify as the past. In college, I majored in history. 30s design speaks volumes to me, and always has. So does 40s music, 50s fashion, and, of course, anything from the 60s on, which is layered with my own childhood and other memories.

towardsea

The word “nostalgia” means “the pain connected with returning home”. The “algos” part comes from Greek, literally meaning pain and grief. Etymologically, then, the word contains the notion of fleetingness, of time actually passing, of the knowledge, conscious or not, that one can’t go home again. Memories may be sweet to look at, but painful to try to recapture, and grief-inducing when our own mortality is brought to bear. Thornton Wilder knew this when he wrote “Our Town”. So did Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, who even set “Fiddler on the Roof”‘s bittersweet “Sunrise, Sunset” during a wedding.

And so did the writers of TV’s “Mad Men”, to bring Madison Avenue back for a moment. The show itself is, of course, a wonderful paean to nostalgia – it delightfully bundles the last of swing-a-ding-ding macho swagger and possibility with great late 50s and early 60s style (The swing coats! Men still wore hats!), not to mention a dose of the new hip ad biz, which was just coming on. In Season One’s closer, Creative Director Don Draper alights on a successful pitch for the Carousel slide projector by homing in on the notion of nostalgia to sell a modern product designed to display simple pleasures to people during a tumultuous time. Sound familiar?

(The episode is also cleverly titled, “The Wheel”, as the Carousel mimics the turning of time.)

porch-at-halloween

Lots of us traffic in nostalgia. And the idea of a simpler time is a big part of that. When I make jam with my daughter, or crafts by hand, I think of grandparents, of those who have done similar before me, without all the modern conveniences. We know we’re fast-paced – often disconnectedly and distractedly so – and many of us share the yearning to slow down and enjoy our families, our friends, ourselves, our homes, and simple pleasures. Witness the complete and mainstream resurgence of the ancient practice of yoga, which, only 20 years ago or so, was practiced by a relatively rare few. Witness the features in parenting magazines that tell us how to “Have a Family Game Night”. Or Conn and Hal Iggulden’s hugely popular “Dangerous Book for Boys,” which capitalizes on people’s desire to recapture lost arts and a simpler time, with instructions on how to read cloud formations and skim stones.

Walt Disney knew a thing or two about nostalgia. He designed Disneyland’s Main Street to hearken back a half-century, to a simpler turn-of-the-century period of telephone party lines, sarsaparilla candy in jars, gas streetlamps, and a watch-repair man on the corner. Indeed, to evoke his own nostalgia-tinged memories of growing up in Marceline, Missouri. He even created Main Street using a 90% scale, to further induce a kind of pleasure and calm, a subconscious feeling that one is visiting a simpler place.

Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, architects and founders of New Urbanism, have built a number of planned communities based on the ideas of tradition and nostalgia. Though many have a beef with their aesthetics, and with the ultimately sterile feel of their developments, it is hard not to admire their stated goal of combating suburban sprawl and desolate “nowheresvilles” with sidewalks and front porches and corner stores, the better for communing and even meeting (gasp!) one’s neighbors. Even they, in their book “Suburban Nation”, say they’d rather live in a mature neighborhood than in a new development, but that a mix of affordability and taste creates a desire for their planned communities. At least they are being planned with some community life in mind.

I will have a lot more to say about nostalgia in all its facets. Appreciations for what is lost, methods for enjoying the appealingly retro now. Memory, time, light, childhood, feelings, music, design, architecture, film, food, farms, cities, resorts, travel, nature, celebrations, politics, commerce – nostalgia touches everything. It’s at once universal and highly personal. As someone might still say, somewhere on Madison Avenue, Stay tuned.

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Photos by Susan Sachs Lipman

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