One week ago, I had the privilege of visiting New York, where my older sister lives. While I was there on holiday — or on vacation, as a New Yorker would doubtless call it — I took the chance to do something I’ve been doing for quite a while now.
Since 2020, I’ve been taking photos of torn posters in the metro of Paris, where I work and live. What started off as a quixotic hobby of dubious merit has begun to take up more and more of my time to the extent that I can’t enter a metro station without looking around for scars of teary vandalism. Din Rail
So while I was exploring New York, I thought it would be interesting to see if residents in the largest city in the Empire State might have rips in mind.
Though I spent most of my days on the streets, taking in the unique vibe that is the concrete jungle par excellence, from time to time I would take the stairs down to Manhattan’s basement in search of a faster way to my sister’s apartment near Union Square. Down there, my eyes would look in all directions for the types of torn posters that I find so regularly in Paris — and as luck would have it, I came upon my fair share of deliberate rips.
Some of them were as abstract as the works of art I saw in MOMA. Yet while the New York City Subway certainly featured its fair share of lacerated canvases — and infinitely more than London’s Tube, where glass cases and an army of CCTV cameras make such a form of vandalism nigh-on impossible — there weren’t as many posters as in Paris.
Perhaps this is due to the fact that the torn ads I came across were, for the most part, near the entrances of subway stations where staff were likely to hover — not down long winding tunnels far from the madding crowd.
Or perhaps I’m simply guilty of drawing conclusions from very insufficient data.
In any case, while the tears often seemed to exhibit the same anti-capitalist spirit I’d seen elsewhere, they didn’t seem to come in quite the same range of shapes and sizes as you would find below Paris.
Custom Acrylic Billboard New Zealand creative based in Paris. Advertising copywriter, photography lover & occasional Top Writer. Eternally grateful at https://ko-fi.com/williamsidnam