Press Coverage

The Omega Oil sign, on Frederick Douglas and 145th, that started it all. (Courtesy Frank Jump)

For more than 20 years photographer Frank Jump has been documenting New York’s fading ads. Slowly vanishing signs of yesteryear, the building ads are ephemera that has stubbornly persisted in our constantly changing urban landscape, in defiance of development, decay and all the other challenges conspiring against them. The most common term for such remnants is ghost signs, but Mr. Jump prefers fading ads. “I never felt comfortable with the word ghost,” he says. “I don’t really believe in ghosts.”

While some may see such remnants of the past as manifestations of loss, Mr. Jump sees them metaphors for survival. “Like myself, many of these ads have long outlived their expected lifespan,” he explained in a recent interview. In 1986, at the age of 26, Mr. Jump was diagnosed with HIV and told that he had a few good years left. Despite the discouraging prognosis, a decade later he was finishing his long-postponed college degree when he saw a massive, faded sign for Omega Oil at 145th Street and Frederick Douglas Boulevard. – CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

Frank Jump noticed his first ghost sign in Harlem. It was a towering, four-story tall series of blue ads painted on red brick, hawking a kind of all-purpose snake oil sold in the United States into the 1920s. Omega Oil, for sunburns, weak backs, stiff joints, sore muscles and athletes. Ten cents for a trial bottle.

“I nearly dropped to my knees,” Jump says. He was, at the time – about 15 years ago – looking for inspiration for a documentary photography class project around the theme of “the rise and fall of New York City,” or “the fall and rise of New York City.”

Jump’s been photographing the city’s ghost signs ever since, and he’s now corralled the images into a new book, Fading Ads of New York City. The images, painted years ago onto the side of buildings all over the city, sell solutions for everything a body might need: cure-alls, snacks, clothes, drinks and laundry products, fur vaults, speakeasies and even undertakers. Jump spoke with Atlantic Cities this week about some of his favorite images, what they say about the history of the city that hosts them, and why he was first drawn to fading ads not long after he was diagnosed with HIV. – CLICK HERE TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE