Image: Canva, using the cover of Melbourne Ghost Signs (2024).
I have been invited to review this book as part of a paid promotion, but I have been told I retain ‘editorial independence’. I suppose this means I can be critical of the work if needed. I wouldn’t put the pressure on the editors of this website to cite this small act of transparency up the front (they do acknowledge the paid promotional nature of this review below), except for the fact that the book under question here—Melbourne Ghost Signs—really is a book about advertisements. It goes to extensive lengths to document signs and ads from yesteryear, whose traces—some largely intact, some fading fast—are located on the sides of buildings across the streets of Melbourne. These photographs, and their accompanying text, are by Sean Reynolds, an American emigrant, who has previously worked on marketing campaigns for Nike, Planned Parenthood, EA Games, Ellen (yes, that Ellen) and TMZ. So, again, marketing/advertising is in the biographical DNA of this book.
Reviews of photobooks are rare to come by. The genre doesn’t naturally fit into the regular pages of literary magazines or newspapers. Photobooks are overlooked by shrinking arts pages too. I had to push and push and push to get up a review of Trent Parke’s gloriously sadistic The Christmas Tree Bucket—documenting the strange traditions of an antipodean Christmas—up at The Monthly more than ten years ago. Its word count was cut down from 4000 to just 400. The editor said take it or leave it. I took it (but then found a home for the full piece in the pages of Island magazine).
Photobooks are overlooked by shrinking arts pages.
Sean Reynolds is no Trent Parke. There isn’t an artistic rationale here. Instead, we have a book made from Instagram-ready photographs, originally published on Reynolds’ account @melbourne_ghostsigns, that serve as a proficient historical archive rather than an effort to push the boundaries of the photographic form. In 2015, Teju Cole wrote on the rise of Instagram as a space for serious photographers (a space for ‘serious play’), noting that ‘users value spectacular individual images and reward them with the coin of the realm: likes.’
Reynolds’ following proves that Instagram users also value story—a narrative built through repetition of form, gradual narrative and, again, a sense of the historical archive—and so he is rewarded with a photobook collecting his digital work and its reach (his publishers must be hoping that his 28,000 followers are interested in buying something they have otherwise been getting for free). In the comments of a recent post, Reynolds revealed he employs an iPhone Pro Max, so we locate ourselves in the world of digital textures and the world of the everyman (most of us own a variation on Reynolds’ tool kit, the camera embedded in the smart phone). And so, along with the everyman, the journeyman applies to Reynolds too.
Reynolds is acting in the flaneur tradition, and the urban walker is often thinking on her feet.
Let’s take the traditional definition of journeyman, which means a good but not great trained practitioner, skilled but not highly skilled—but let’s also apply a misreading of journeyman as a walker. Reynolds is acting in the flaneur tradition, and the urban walker is often thinking on her feet, making quick mental notes or sketchbook scribblings towards a larger project. If she gets home at the right time, she might be able to collate her notes into something more significant—but the notes can also stay in note form. (Reynolds writes pocketbook histories, text that sit aside his photographs; we have to think whether these are conducted on his iPhone too, while he walks, or does he write and research later at home?) I would recommend seeking out Delia Falconer’s ‘Covid Walking: Diary’ in Signs and Wonders for the expert essayist’s version of this project—with her accompanying dilettante Instagram photos, more focused on mood and light—and so to also access the Sydney variation on Reynolds’ Melbourne (one wonders if the uniformity of the light in Reynolds’ was dictated by curfews during Melbourne’s Covid-19 lockdowns; a quick scan shows no night scenes).
The photography of Melbourne Ghost Signs is pedestrian—you could read this either as a criticism of the quality of the photography, or you could take it literally, that this is photography taken by a pedestrian. This way, you could make your own mind up about Reynolds’ proficiency as a street photographer and my reading can remain ambiguous. What is clear, however, is that Reynolds is documenting a city literally rewriting itself—groups of corporate interests (building owners, say), governing councils and certain graffito-enthusiast citizenry, make daily decisions about what history remains on the surface of a city. Reynolds locates some fading advertisements for products still familiar and accessible to us today—Australia Post, Bushells and Lipton tea, Uncle Tobys, Cinzano, Victoria Bitter, Kodak (just). Most feel long lost to us, their names foreign.
One of Reynolds’ most charming anecdotes is his valiant attempt to track down a bottle of Tarax after seeing it advertised on a fading sign on Union Street, Brunswick—a storied soft drink that started out as a beer alternative (the Heaps Normal of its day) before becoming a serious competitor to Coca-Cola, and subsequently being sold to Schweppes. Reynolds travels from ‘Bendigo to Beechworth… Springvale to Sea Lake’ in search of a fizzy fix to no avail. His obsessive pursuit—of Tarax, of the history of Melbourne’s many surface remnants—reminds the reader of the motivating principles of Vanessa Berry’s 2017 masterpiece Mirror Sydney:
To write of a city’s shadows and undercurrents is to use these details and atmospheres as threshold, opening up the repository that is stored beneath them.
Reynolds’ brief—too brief—end-matter points to his own motivations, in a very moving note dedicating the work to his daughter, before writing that the book (or, is it, the Instagram?) started ‘during the bizarre vacuum of the early 2020s amid the global pandemic chaos’. Father and daughter walked together, a ‘project birthed from the cabin fever of lockdown’. This situates Reynolds’ work as one of another form of archiving. He is history-making, double-fold: a history of these ‘ghost signs’ and a historical archiving of walking during Covid-19. The reduced headcount of human figures—appearing instead fleetingly as ant-sized, socially distanced bystanders—can be easily explained by the fact that there were likely very few people out and about. The busiest scenes corners depicted at Flinders Street Station and the Melbourne GPO are still dramatically thinned. The largest human figure are a graffito recreation of a topless George Costanza from Seinfeld, arm reached out, mouth agape, and Little Audrey, the Skipping Girl Vinegar mascot, looming large over Victoria Street, Abbotsford.
Reynolds is documenting a city literally rewriting itself.
How was this project impacted by the eventual radiuses set by the Victorian government? One likes to imagine Reynolds and his daughter pushing out further than the cursory boundaries set. Reynolds is an amiable, doting tour guide in his accompanying texts—he has a quick-wittedness, merges biography and autobiography with great skill, wedding the contemporary scene to the historical fact—but alas he’s failed in the basics of history-making, as he has given us no citations for his references. There is no source list, no in-text referencing, no footnotes, no endnotes. Even an undergraduate history student would have their assignment sent straight back to them with a quizzical, chiding note: ‘Where is your bibliography?’ Maybe Reynolds is not presenting himself as an historian. On his Instagram page, he calls himself a ‘cultural archaeologist’, but this still situates himself within an academic tradition. Without citations, is this just a gift book? Can we review a gift book with any great sense of seriousness? ‘Serious play’—as Teju Cole’s essay title ran—yes, but nowhere close to serious scholarship.
Melbourne Ghost Signs does, however, find its particular significance and sway in its sub-status as a work of narrative non-fiction focused on the Covid-19 lockdowns—the aimless strolls, the mini-escapes and escapades, and finding poetics in strange places. The hyper-fixation on signs and their histories has given Reynolds a point of difference, and in the distinct lack of contemporary human bodies—parked cars have a more consistent presence than people—he has also created a document of a Melbourne that suffered more than most other cities in the world. The lockdowns were long and hard, the trauma still lingers when I visit friends now. The city seems unsure of its identity, uncertain of how to remake itself once more. This may be the true haunting of the story. Melbourne Ghost Signs then is a useful and very productive archive—but citations next time, Reynolds, please. Ghosts need their traces.
Melbourne Ghost Signs is our Debut Spotlight book for December.
Debut Spotlight is a paid partnership with Australian publishers designed to promote the critical discussion of new authors’ work to a wide audience. Titles are selected by KYD, and all reviews have editorial independence.
