Graham MacIndoe‘s photographs of missing persons posters, which we first saw on PetaPixel, document the sad and desperate public pleas to locate lost love ones. The images are spare, quiet, and isolated, despite the artist primarily focusing on posters in bustling urban areas like New York City. MacIndoe is interested in the way each poster slowly disintegrates with time, covered up and vanishing with weathered age, becoming symbolic of the people that have disappeared.
“I never saw anybody ever really looking at them,” he recently told the New York Times. “People just run past them. They slowly deteriorate in the weather and elements. I became very aware of them. They’re often handmade with these pleading requests, and the pictures they select to put on them — graduation pictures, smiley happy pictures, pictures of betters times — that’s what really drew me to them.”
MacIndoe shared his work with us past the break. Click through for a closer look at his poignant photo series.
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
East Village Window
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Gowanus
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Nostrand Avenue, Brooklyn
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Tennessee
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Token Booth, Brooklyn
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
13th St., Brooklyn
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Coney Island
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Midtown, NYC
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Brooklyn
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Brooklyn
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Chinatown, NYC
Image credit: Graham MacIndoe
Prospect Park, Brooklyn