Holly High senior hard worker, focused

signboard

Image by docman
See ‘signboard’ on black!

HOMMAGE TO AN OLD CAST-IRON SIGNBOARD

In the early seventies of the last century the Jordaan, Amsterdam’s oldest workers quarter, just outside the ring of canals, was still just that; a workers quarter, well known throughout the country for its distinct dialect/language, (sub)culture of music, songs, stories, jokes, kitschy interiors, etc. Since then gentrification has hit the area big time and nowadays it is mostly a yuppy-ish inner city neighbourhood with lots of fancy restaurants, deli’s, shops and galleries.

I moved into the area in 1972 as one of the first students/outsiders to do so. In fact, my friends and I rented an old warehouse , which for the previous hundred years (at least!) had housed a business in scrap metal and old textile ("lompen en metalen"): four empty floors, in the middle a hole with double hatches and on the top floor an old, 19th century cast iron pulley-block to haul the wares up and down.

Our first job was to clear out the remnants of the old business before we could start converting the building into liveable apartments but that is another story. One of the remnants is depicted here: the old signboard which for many, many years had hung outside. On its outer layer it reads “buying textiles and olds metals, firm of A.Smit” but showing through is the lettering of an earlier sign when the business was owned by one W.C. Pannekoek or Pancake…

The signboard became a trophy that hung in my apartment for the eight years I lived in the building and which afterwards I lugged with me from one house to the next. It didn’t hang on the wall anymore and usually ended up hanging in this shed or standing in that one but I never got rid of it.

With time the different layers of crumbling paint, together with the rust shining through provided the signboard with changing patterns of color, texture and rhythm. It is these patterns I have tried to capture in this series of images;

check out the set

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