Cities constantly evolve to meet the needs of the people who live and work in them, but this inevitable evolution has its downsides. Local neighbourhoods full of character aren’t immune to the grand plans of property developers and many small business owners – active in their communities for generations – are concerned about such ‘progress’ and what it means for them.
With many beloved ‘mom-and-pop’ store frontages disappearing from New York City’s streets, photographers James and Karla Murray decided to document them for posterity. As their latest storefronts photo book goes on sale, we spoke to the couple to find out more.
How did the book come together?
Karla: It was born from an entirely different project. We were documenting graffiti art and, in the 1990s, these mom-and-pop stores became almost parallel to graffiti. Graffiti is a temporary art form so it’s important to document it when you see it and we began to notice that a lot of these small places, even in the early 2000s, had started closing.
James: We had collected this vast collection of film photos and I remember the day the editor for the graffiti book was over at our house. We were editing the book and we had photographs of a bunch of storefronts in long strips on our wall. Karla: He happened to glance up at our wall and asked ‘What’s that stuff?’, and we said it was just mom-and-pop stores in New York. He was from California, so we didn’t think he’d have any interest in what a store in New York was like. He asked us to take one of the strips out of the frame and started folding the photos into the book. He asked if we had any more pictures like these and we said there were thousands,
