words & pictures

The great Jay Maisel likes to say “Don’t put words in your photographs unless you want people to read them.”  Typical dry Jay humor.  But he goes on to explain that, as we scan a new scene, the human brain tends to direct our eyes to word patterns first.  So what he’s getting at is this: be careful of stray words or letters in your carefully composed shots.  A point well taken.

But sometimes there is visual “wordplay” in our everyday surroundings.  Anyone who lives in an urban area knows how true this can be.  There are literally thousands of signs, scribbles, grafitti and such almost everywhere you look.  And some are worth photographing.

This one was almost too good to be true:

Then there are those that are so generic they could be right out of an SNL skit:

There’s some history here, now forgotten:

I think there’s a bigger project in here somewhere…