Temporary Services has gathered photographs for over 20 years documenting what we call Public Phenomena. We have many examples of how people alter private and public spaces in informal ways. These modifications change how the built environment is used and understood. They can be found in urban and rural settings. his collection includes parking place savers, block club signs, and memorials to victims of traffic accidents and gang violence. We have numerous photos of abandoned signs left to rot and fall apart long after stores have closed. People modify trees, city streets, vacant lots, and many other spaces both intentionally and unintentionally. This can tell us a lot about the deep social, economic, racial, and other conditions that exist in a place.
PUBLICATIONS & IMAGE ARCHIVES
Abandoned Signs archiveThis is the complete collection of images we took of Abandoned Signs. We made a publication of selected images. See other listings on this page.
Abandoned Signs, by Temporary Services, June 2017.In many urban centers, we have more disused storefronts and retail architecture than can easily be filled with new businesses. Some of these spaces sit empty for years. There is a gaping disparity between the daily rhetoric of a capitalist society, and an honest assessment of the waste, repetition, redundancy, and inefficiencies of so much activity done in the name of business, productivity, and entrepreneurial freedom. Abandoned Signs are potent reminders of how much energy we put into things we don’t need that are irrevocably shifting the ecology of our planet.
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Get a printed copy.
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Public Phenomena (中国的 and English), by Temporary Services, February 2014.Shared spaces are areas that people pass through, gather in, or otherwise occupy for a period of time. Shared space can be public, corporate, private, or combinations of all three. For this booklet we have selected photos from our Public Phenomena collection that focus on informal modifications of shared city and rural spaces involving plants and trees. These are both real and fake trees, running wild in man-made spaces, turned into poles for mounted basketball hoops, and used as support structures for signs, shrines, decorations, and memorials.
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Get a printed copy.
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Public Phenomena (poster-booklet folds from A1 down to A5), by Temporary Services, February 2013.This poster-booklet is the result of over fifteen years of photographic documentation and research on the variety of modifications and inventions that people make in public. From roadside memorials to piles of unused bicycles, people consistently alter shared common spaces to suit their needs, or let both man-made and natural aberrations run wild. The result is a new kind of public space that lies just outside of ideological articulations with creative, inspiring, and sometimes confounding moments that push past the original planned design of cities.
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Get a printed copy.
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Mobile Phenomena, by Temporary Services, September 2012.Mobile Phenomena is a new collection of over eighty-five photographs and two interviews. It is the result of years of research on common instances of mobile phenomena that impact people and their uses of shared city and rural spaces. In this book you will find bookmobiles, mobile forms of commerce, inventive mobile art projects, mobile structures created for use during protest, and some strange applications of mobility that defy easy description,categorization, or whose function could not be readily discerned. Mobile Phenomena can unhinge the expected roles we take in shared city spaces. Mobile structures can become a new norm when they work. It is our hope that this book can be an inspiration to other citizens, artists, activists, nomads, and anyone who is interested in escaping the constraints of their location, culture, or other factors that make realizing oneʼs desires difficult.
Mobile Phenomena includes contributions by: Courtney Dailey, Alexis Petroff, Joseph Robertson, Jen Hofer, Eric Steen, Christian Ettinger, Platform, Liberate Tate, The Center For Tactical Magic, and Nils Norman.
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Mobile Phenomena includes contributions by: Courtney Dailey, Alexis Petroff, Joseph Robertson, Jen Hofer, Eric Steen, Christian Ettinger, Platform, Liberate Tate, The Center For Tactical Magic, and Nils Norman.
Get a printed copy.
Public Phenomena, by Temporary Services, Chicago: Half Letter Press, full color, 152 pages, perfect bound, October 2008.This book is the result of over ten years of photographic documentation and research on the variety of modifications and inventions people make in public. From roadside memorials to makeshift barriers, people consistently alter shared common spaces to suit their needs, or let both man-made and natural aberrations run wild. The result is a new kind of public space with creative and inspiring moments that push past the original planned design of cities.
We are sold out of this publication. We offer a high resolution PDF through our store.
We are sold out of this publication. We offer a high resolution PDF through our store.
Alexis Petroff, September 2005.Alexis Petroff extensively documented Chicago scrapper trucks and shopping carts. Some of his photographs are included in this publication.
Alexis Petroff overview pageHere is a page with links to Alexis Petroff's images of Chicago scrapper trucks and shopping carts.
Public Phenomena spread for Multitudes magazine, 2006.We made a spread of public phenomena research for an issue of Multitudes magazine (Paris). It was a special issue printed in conjunction with the Transmission exhibition we participated in at the Villa Arson in Nice, France. For the publication, we look at three new categories of Public Phenomena: trees that have been severely cropped to preserve fences and power lines, fences and walls made from attaching several pieces of wood and assorted materials together, and traces of buildings that have been torn down but have left marks on adjacent structures.
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Download the PDF.
Public Phenomena archiveHere is a publicly available selection of Public Phenomena photographs we have taken.
Public Phenomena: Informal Modifications of Public Space, Temporary Services, 2005.From roadside memorials to makeshift barriers, people consistently alter shared common spaces to suit their needs, or let both man-made and natural aberrations run wild. The result is a new kind of public space with creative and inspiring moments that push past the original planned design of cities." All of these photos were taken in Chicago and the Midwest. The themes this time around are: roadside memorials, parking place savers, block club signs, homemade basketball hoops, and an anomalous image of a truck rebuilt inside a tree. The variety of photos of the myriad amusing ways that Chicagoans block off space for their car in the winter after a snowstorm is particularly rich in this booklet.
Get a printed copy.
Download the PDF.
Get a printed copy.
Download the PDF.
Architectural Association School of LondonThe image is from a poster-booklet we made to accompany an exhibition we had of Public Phenomena at the Architectural Association of London galleries.
Images
Images
