Author: Temporary Services
Publisher: Chicago and Auburn, Indiana: Half Letter Press, 2017, second printing November 2017.
Pages: 32
Format: PDF

Temporary Services booklet #116 returns to our fixation on Public Phenomena, this time with a focus on abandoned signs from the Midwest (mostly Chicago, and Fort Wayne and Auburn, Indiana). Over 50 photos fill this full color booklet. Thanks to the group Fictilis and their Museum of Capitalism project and exhibition for commissioning this publication. From the back cover:

In many urban centers, we have more disused storefronts and retail architecture than can easily be filled with new businesses. Some of these spaces sit empty for years. There is a gaping disparity between the daily rhetoric of a capitalist society, and an honest assessment of the waste, repetition, redundancy, and inefficiencies of so much activity done in the name of business, productivity, and entrepreneurial freedom. Abandoned Signs are potent reminders of how much energy we put into things we don’t need that are irrevocably shifting the ecology of our planet. The photographs in this publication were taken by Temporary Services (Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer) between 2015 and 2017. The signs are primarily from Indiana (Fort Wayne and Auburn) and Chicago. We have been documenting material like this under the heading Public Phenomena, as a constant mode of visual research since we began working together in 1998.