Matthew Frye Jacobson, a professor of American Studies at Yale, made a gallery of hundreds of photographs of commercial buildings that have "Space Available." Indeed, that's the name of the photo series. For Jacobson, these signs are visceral representations of the economic crisis. Space Available is part of Jacobson's larger Historian's Eye project, a photographic and audio documentation of "Obama's first term in office, the '08 economic collapse and its fallout, two wars, the raucous politics of healthcare reform, the emergence of a new right-wing formation in opposition to Obama, the politics of immigration, Wall Street reform, street protests of every stripe, the BP oil spill, and the seeming escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide." Over at Design Observer, BB pal Rob Walker interviewed Jacobson.
From Design Observer:
The "Space Available" collection is more than 900 photographs of, basically, buildings with signs indicating vacant commercial or retail space. Let's face it, that sounds incredibly boring. Why should we look at pictures of these mundane signs?
While there are a couple of images in it that I'm attached to, for the most part that gallery is not functioning in a way that's meant to arrest you one image at a time. It's the scale. There's something cumulative about it.
I go back to the Bonnie Fox interview, where she said there's nothing public about this crisis. And those signs were one of the few public markers she'd picked up on. Once you start noticing them, you see them everywhere you go — these massive numbers of fairly recently closed businesses. And it just goes unremarked and unnoted. Everything in the culture is privatized, including the crisis itself, right? One of the aspirations of that part of the site is to make that public again, to make it part of the public conversation about what's happening to our society.
It's a very hard crisis to photograph, for exactly the reasons she was talking about. I'd been out in the world trying to photograph it, and I couldn't find it anywhere, until she tipped me to the space available signs. "Space Available" became a sub genre of its own, in my mind.
