Over the past view years it dawned on me that I had a strong attraction to the kind of signs you often see hand painted on the windows of seedy low rent businesses in the low parts of towns.
This idea really hit home when my wife and I rode our bicycles into Anniston, Alabama. We were celebrating out 20th wedding anniversary by taking an exotic trip to a town that by all appearances reached its peak about the time the state of Israel was founded and had mostly been on the skids ever since.
We rode in on the Chief Ladiga bike trail-the same trail that in Georgia is called the Silver Comet.
When we got to Anniston I was struck by how many hand painted signs and empty storefronts there were.
I realized that this was a very ephemeral phenomenon. These paintings represented marginal businesses and marginal buildings. They could be here today and gone tomorrow.
But mostly they were just really cool paintings made for a specialized purpose under sub-optimal conditions. Whimsical, surreal, and by necessity done quickly with a lot of energy.
I have a lot of catching up to do to get everything I've already photographed into this blog so I'm gonna be going kind of forward and backwards at the same time.
Also I'm just figuring out how this blog works so check back as often as you can stand, leave a note and I'll try to bang this into shape. Thanx, Terry
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