Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.
Hypothetical question: Your house is on fire. Everyone is safe. You can run in and rescue one item. What will it be?
The answer, overwhelmingly, is family photos.
We are the sum of our memories. Photos help us capture time and space, preserve moments that otherwise would be lost. I seek the ordinary, the flat reality which is otherwise invisible.
Readers who have been following Seraphic Secret for a while are aware of our fondness for signs. In signage we detect various levels of aesthetics including grammar, fonts—remember when virtually everything was Helvetica—to the use of color. And of course, signs frequently stand witness to the health or deterioration of a particular community’s economic condition.
Over the past few years we’ve snapped hundreds of photos of signs. And as an educational device we’ve arranged selected pictures as an ABC photo essay with images from Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Teaneck and, of course, Brooklyn.