For more than 30 years New York graphic designer Louise Fili traveled in Italy and Paris, where she snapped photos of signs she admired with a 35mm SLR camera. The typography inspired her, she says, and helped shape her style, which is highly sought after by restaurants and food packaging companies, such as William-Sonoma and Bella Cucina. Louise never intended to use the images for anything other than reference, until a trip to Rome few years ago, when she noticed some of her favorite signs had disappeared.
“I had a sense of urgency to go back to as many cities as I could to re-photograph as much as I could,” she says. Last year she published Grafica della Strada (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), a photo book of Italy’s gorgeous signs. Her second photo book on street signs, Graphique de la Rue: The Signs of Paris (Princeton Architectural Press, September, 2105), is an unabashed love letter to the romantic, artistic flair of Parisian signage. “In Paris there are all these classic script neon signs in cafes that you’d think would stay around forever.” Sadly, non.
Soon after finishing the book on Italy, Louise got cracking on capturing Parisian signage, visiting the city three times over the course of a year armed with a Canon Powershot G12 digital point-and-shoot camera. “I would start every morning at 5:30. In August, when everyone is on vacation, I had the entire city to myself. I’d shoot until about 10:30 when the shadows were too harsh to shoot anymore. Whenever it was too sunny or raining I would get on a bus, and when I saw an interesting sign I’d jot down the address and go back later to photograph it.”
Louise is grateful to digital camera technology because it enabled her to capture such wonderful images. She’s also thankful for another innovative technology: Google Street View. “It’s fantastic!” she enthuses. While in New York, “I would spend time every day virtually driving down these streets and I found some of the signs that way. I never would have had the time to do that if I was physically walking.”
But technology is a double-edge sword. “Ironically, it’s technology that is making all the great signs disappear and replacing them with these clumsily crafted signs made out of plastic.” One sign’s demise was particularly heartbreaking. “One of my favorites was the Tabac sign in Paris and I was shocked when I couldn’t find it. I found the building but now it has a really ugly sign. It’s too bad, but that’s what happens.”
To Louise’s surprise, when Grafica della Strada was published, the Italian press embraced it. “Just about every newspaper and magazine wrote about it saying, ‘We pass by these things every day and never take notice of them. It took an American to come and appreciate it.’” She’s hopeful the Parisians, too, will take her book to heart and save the elegant, unique signage that help make Paris Paris.
Louise Fili’s Graphique de la Rue: The Signs of Paris is available on Amazon.
Photography by Louise Fili.
