Good or Bad? Improvement Over The Old? A Study In Change

The wall murals, in context.  This building sits next on a short, dead end street and adjacent to double
mainline railroad tracks.  The murals or advertisements have just been repainted. (click to enlarge)

There is a small town near where I live that is not much more than a couple of traffic lights on a main highway.  Their claim to fame for me had always been a) the mainline railroad runs through the old town and provided some interesting backgrounds for some of my railroad photography and, b) a Dairy Queen.  We don't want to talk about Dairy Queen Blizzards now, do we? :-)

This is how the building looked for as long as I can remember.  I photographed the remnants of
the individual faded advertisements many times over a few decades. (click to enlarge)

This is how the building now looks. Which is better for photography?  (click to enlarge)

Parallel to the railroad tracks is an old building and on one wall of that old red brick building were the faint remnants of an old painted advertisements and the names of businesses that occupied that building.  Old wall murals and old advertisements are a couple of subjects that I have always enjoyed finding and photographing.  They give us a clue into the past.

Recently, I saw an article in my local weekly newspaper that a group had gotten together and had the old advertisements refreshed and an additional mural painted alongside the originals.  Last week, having to desperately get out of the house after the Covid bout, I drove to the small town and see what had been done.  I've posted a few of the images of the 'new' along with images I had made of what 'was' there.

My question is, "Is this an improvement or has this effort ruined the historical value of the old?"

All of the above photos are nice illustrations of before and after.  However, my favorite is the treatment below.

A B and W conversion, with just a hint of warm toned blacks. A 2015 image. (click to enlarge)

This version gives me the look and feel of finding an aging sign on an old brick building.  The black and white tonalities nicely compliment the old weathered wood covering the former doorway, the mortar missing from between many of the bricks and the architecture of the building itself.  IMHO, color doesn't enhance the scene.

Also, this is good example of the importance of photographing the old, run down, abandoned, historically interesting, etc. things that you may see as we know, people and time change things. Often permanently.  Never to be able to go back.  Once those old historically interesting or significant artifacts have disappeared or have been altered, they are lost to the future.

At the very far end of the building is one more mural that I've chosen not to show.  It is not an update of an original painted advertisement, but a mural that commemorates the repainting of the other advertisements.  It highlights the group that sponsored this project as well as the donors names and businesses.  In the center is a painting of a frog within a heart.  I have no idea what that represents, but this last piece of artwork is not germane to the point of this post.  Just for the record, The Women's Club of Windsor, Inc. (VA) sponsored the project.

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Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  

Dennis A. Mook  

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