Daylight Books released The Many Pleasures : Found Art in New York City, a book with photographs by Barton Lewis and an essay by Kathleen Hulser.
“Lewis’s photographic journey through New Yorkers’ rip, tear, and mark rebellion affirms the anarchic energy of urban street art. From witty excavation to gob-smacking overwriting, The Many Pleasures invites us to engage with urban poetics and decode the city’s soul.” — Kathleen Hulser
Since 2018, filmmaker and photographer Barton Lewis has photographed urban surfaces altered and transformed by humans, weather, or time on New York City’s streets and subways. The Many Pleasures: Found Art in New York City is a rich collection of images that demonstrates art is everywhere, and for everyone.
The book is divided into two parts. On the Street includes posters, stickered and painted over mailboxes, building walls, and other structural elements. In one particularly arresting gatefold, torn advertisement posters of Levi’s 501 jeans are shown plastered on an abandoned industrial building. For this image (see detail below), Lewis digitally stitched together 152 images to reinforce the relentless barrage of advertising messages our culture is subjected to, particularly in urban environments.
New York City public historian, Kathleen Hulser, wrote the essay for the book, and she highlights the messaging this particular image holds, commenting, “Weathering has lacerated the posters into individual ghosts of their former selves, a procession that extends sixty-five feet. The phenomenon of large unoccupied industrial buildings reduced to marketing space speaks to how cycles of decay can make the once solid city seem like a movie set of forlorn facades.”
She also notes the role of language throughout Lewis’ imagery. The re-translation of meaning through the torn, defaced, or naturally decaying advertising leaves behind remnants of words originally meant to convince or even reinforce a cultural divide, and transforms them.
She writes, “Lewis makes us aware of the layered rhetoric of advertising, how weaponized language and icons are deployed to persuade and open wallets. Advertising originated as a layered language of culture symbols. But the symbolic language of ads operates in public space, where commercial aims may be bent to other, more free-spirited expressions. Both natural deterioration and the deliberate slicing of ads underline the metaphoric energy of these palimpsests.”
For the subway wall cuts, Lewis composites each image from 12 to 18 different shots, and some of them stretch 14 feet or longer. The images are created to include the borders of the iconic subway tiles, reinforcing the sense of place these visuals inhabit. Advertising is about consumerism and attention-getting; but when altered, the images, colors, shapes, and text messages become street art, and carry commentaries on society, history, and redefinitions of creative agency. The energy of New York plays a role in this collection of work, and Lewis highlights this significance.
Barton Lewis is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and photographer whose current work centers around features and fixtures of the street and subway transformed by street artists and organic decay. Most recently, his photography showed in an exhibit at Gallery 85, in the lobby of Google’s New York headquarters, in The Indian Photo Festival, in Hyderabad, and at the Barcelona Foto Biennale. His work was featured in the May-June 2023 issue of The Harvard Business Review. Before turning to photography in 2018, Barton made films about natural light and the urban landscape. His films have been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Szczecin, Poland and elsewhere in the US and Europe.
Barton Lewis : The Many Pleasures – Found Art in New York City
Daylight Books
Essay by Kathleen Hulser
125 pages
77 photographs
9 x 9 inches
ISBN-13: 9781954119406
https://daylightbooks.org/products/the-many-pleasures-found-art-in-new-york-city
