Signage

Unlike Pictorialist photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Hine embraced the commercial lettering and imagery that adorned the walls and sandwich boards of Broadway. He photographed the giant billboards that covered condemned buildings and the flashing electric “sky-signs” that were beginning to define Midtown Broadway as the Great White Way, as well as their precursors such as the archaic hand-painted signs that downtown proprietors hung on their facades. His uptown photographs feature numerous posters—pasted, often illegally, onto shacks and fences—advertising musicals, circuses, “Wild West” shows, and other popular entertainments staged elsewhere on Broadway.

Echoing those captured by later photographers such as Walker Evans, some of Hine’s posters are torn or fading. And, like later surrealists such as Joseph Cornell, he gravitated toward commercial images of women, both stars such as Lillie Langtry and generic female figures in advertisements for clothing or cosmetics.