2151 51st Avenue
This entry was posted on 21 July 2014 at 12:05 am and is filed under 1913. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
1913 – Avelar & Co.
2151 51st Avenue
Oakland Underfoot 
21 July 2014 at 8:59 pm
Hi Andrew
This is an impressive collection and a serious effort in what I call “ephemeral history”! I started taking photos of sidewalk stamps in Berkeley as a photographic series for a loosely visualized art project. I soon found myself fascinated by the variety of designs and dates. Stamped into the concrete they do become like fossils of the architecture of their era. I have found the design and type faces to reflect the architectural mood of their time. Have you found this to be the case too? I call this ephemeral history because the stamps seem overlooked as sidewalks are redeveloped or simply repaired after decades of use. They represent snapshots of people’s work that are slowly being erased. Without someone documenting their existence they become only a memory of those who were there, eventually to disappear in the haze of passing time.
I will develop the photo project more thoroughly and post the pictures online. Thanks for the inspiration. (I thought I was the only one interested in these!)
[Thanks, John. Visit some of the links I’ve listed on the front page, too.
This field is an interesting intersection of culture, technology and geology—culture in the names and typography and symbology, technology in the stamps and techniques, geology in the sources of aggregate and other raw materials.]