Ralston Crawford: Torn Signs

Ralston Crawford (1906–1978) was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, and grew up in Buffalo, New York. The son of a ship captain, he had an innate love of the sea and traveled extensively throughout his life. Crawford received wide acclaim for his early Precisionist paintings of urban, industrial landscapes, such as Overseas Highway, 1939, a painting of the 113-mile highway through the Florida Keys, which was published in Life magazine the same year. He remains perhaps best known for these works, but over the course of a career that spanned five decades, he was constantly exploring new ways to record and reimagine his experiences. Crawford began experimenting with photography in 1934, but his breakthrough in the medium came in 1938, the year he created Torn Signs, Philadelphia, an image of a ripped and pasted-over “Post No Bills” sign. The simultaneous buildup and decay of weathered advertisements papered across cities from New York to Pamplona, Spain, spoke to Crawford. He returned frequently to the motif in the last 30 years of his life, creating an incredible body of work that became his longest-running series. This audiobook includes a PDF that features many works from the catalogue for easy reference.