Looking Up to Look Back: The Fading Ads of New York

Fading Ads of New York City

Author: Frank Jump
Publisher: The History Press
Publication Date: Nov. 2011

In 1986, when Frank Jump was 26 years old, he was diagnosed as HIV positive. It was a time when doctors still knew little of the disease. They estimated Jump only had a few years left to live.

The doctors were wrong. Nearly 10 years after his diagnosis, things started looking up for Jump — literally.

In 1997, he “discovered” an ad for Omega Oil, a cure-all tonic, painted on the side of a New York City building. It was the beginning of a quest to photograph old ads painted or glued to the sides of city buildings, ads he views as relics of New York’s past. The quest has consumed Jump ever since.

“New York is a never-ending process,” Jump explained in an interview with WFUV’s Cityscape. “Building and reconstruction and renovation of New York is constant. As new buildings go up and old buildings come down, there’s going to be new ads revealed. It’s exciting to watch. I think this will be something I do until the day I die.”

Click below to see Frank’s photos of fading ads and to read the stories behind them:

Frank Jump's first “discovery” and the ad that sparked his interest in documenting fading ads. In 1997, he was walking with a friend in Harlem when he first noticed it at the intersection of West 147th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. To get the right shot, he wrote that climbed "the construction scaffolding that still surrounded the newly built police department precinct building" adjacent to the mural. You can see the rising brick support columns at the construction site in the foreground.

Photo by Frank Jump.

For an entire summer, Jump photographed the slow growth of vines over an ad for Eaglo Paint in Brooklyn. Jump remembers that the effects of nature made an impression on him. He wasn’t sure what would come of documenting the transition, but only a few weeks after the final photograph of the Eaglo sign that he took in 1998, painters scraped away the vines and covered it over with a silver, water-resistant paint. Eaglo Paint company used a great deal of toxic chemicals in the manufacture of its paints, which help them last a century in the bitter cold and blistering heat of New York’s seasons.

Photo by Frank Jump.

Frank Jump coined the term "ediglyph" to describe fading ads and graffiti. It's combination of the word "edifice" and "petroglyph," an ancient wall carving.

Jump photographed this ad on White Plains Road in the Bronx in 1997. He notes that often the old ads remain untouched by modern graffiti taggers. “Where the two works of art collide -- the ancient painted message of a long deceased commercial artist and the cryptic message or cartoon image of a spray paint artist -- a uniquely significant ediglyph is created.”

Photo by Frank Jump.

This is Jump's only photo from Staten Island. The slogan, “Eventually. Why not now?” is barely legible on the bottom right, and was supposedly a serendipitous find from the trash of a senior ad man. It was rescued by a young member of the firm who later became the first president of General Mills, Inc. The New York mill was built after the one in Minneapolis shut down and is the first to use automatic steel rollers.

Photo by Frank Jump.

According to Jump, this image taken on 47th Street in 1997 “best illustrates the collision of two advertising eras and serves as a time capsule.” A friend called Jump after a building had been demolished to expose this ad. That didn't last long as one year later it was obscured again when a new building rose in the same lot. Jump notices the juxtaposition of ads in the background: one advertising Broadway shows, a spiraling red and white ad for Levi’s rises above an ad for a stereo system. In the lower left corner of the image is a banner for “Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.” Jump said he feels it's an on-going testament to the continual renewal of New York City.

Photo by Frank Jump.

Jump has displayed his collection of photographs of faded ads in museums and recently compiled them into a book, “Fading Ads of New York City.”

As Jump entered his second decade with HIV, he said that the decaying ads came to represent the friends he lost to AIDS. “I’ve watched many, many, many, many people die. I even have address books with telephone numbers that I just stapled shut because everybody in it was gone,” said Jump.

Click below to hear Cityscape host George Bodarky’s interview with Frank Jump about the fading ads project:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The artists who painted the ads, some of which go back to the late 19th century, were called “wall dogs.” When Jump began publishing photographs of the ads on his blog, fadingad.com, several of the “wall dogs” contacted him from their nursing homes.

Jump, who is now 52, will stop at nothing in his quest to shoot the ads. He has scaled rickety fire escapes, pulled over on busy highways and walked along elevated train tracks. Jump admits to faking appointments in certain buildings to get up to the roof and even outrunning guard dogs to get the right angle in the right light.

“This book tells two stories,” wrote Dr. Andrew Irving, an anthropologist, in the book’s foreward. “That of New York City and its obsession with money, advertising and renewal over the last 150 years; and the story of the life of a teacher and photographer who has dedicated much of his time to documenting and archiving the hundreds of gigantic advertisements that were painted, often by hand, on the sides of walls and buildings.” Jump feels that the faded ads open a window into the New York of yesteryear and can change the way we see the city.

Does Jump think the city should restore the ads to their former glory? He says no. Just like every living thing, they were meant to fade away — or be torn down unexpectedly.