Arts & Entertainment

Altadena Artist Photographs "Ghost Signs"

Dr. Ken Jones, a retired JPL scientist and Hollywood special effects wizard, has found a unique art form and he's ready to share it.

What would you do if important, iconic artwork was in danger of falling apart right in front of your eyes without anybody else realizing it?

The answer for Dr. Ken Jones, a retired JPL scientist and Hollywood visual effects supervisor, is to devote your time to photographing it and showing it to others.

However, what Jones sees as art is easy to overlook: he's become a devotee of "ghost signs," old advertisements and branding illustrations dating back a century or more on the side of American buildings that have begun to fade and disappear.  That can mean a decades-old Coca Cola ad, a once-popular tobacco brand that has since disappeared, or just a particularly colorful illustration for a local general store.

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In doing the work, Jones has found all kinds of interesting little slices of history: for example, in a California town he photographed an ad for "Cyrus Noble" whiskey, a brand popular among miners in the 1800s that was legendarily named for a worker at the distillery who died after falling into a vat of the whiskey.

Jones, an Altadena resident, will be displaying his work for the first time at the event at the on June 11.

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For the last two years, Jones has traveled around the country visiting the sites of the signs, shooting them from many angles, and enhancing them with computer software.

For Jones, it is a combination of art and historical preservation, and an important task.

"100 years from now," Jones said, "they won't be there anymore."

The irony of Jones' desire to preserve the images for people to see is that he has found that many of the residents who live near the old signs have never taken a good look at them.  Frequently, he said, residents will ask him what he's doing as he sets up his equipment and points it at an ancient brick wall.

But Jones is far from the only one devoted to the art: google "ghost signs" and you'll see pages of blogs, photo galleries, and books devoted to them.

While many people have taken photos of the signs, Jones has taken the art a bit further.  In many cases, the signs are hard to read, parts of them blocked by other buildings, electrical poles, trees.  Often they are small enough or faded enough that they hardly register to an average passerby.

So Jones takes dozens of photos of each one from many different angles.  He takes all the photos and breaks them down into usable data pieces, and like a puzzle, pieces them together into one continuous view that sometimes does not exist outside of the confines of his photo. 

Jones also reworks the background around the walls into a more scenic backdrop, replacing parked cars and sidewalk with grass, trees, and sky photographed in areas nearby, giving the photos a more pastoral feel that is often more consistent with the era in which the signs were first painted.

To get his shots Jones has to work hard: he has gone to the tops of neighboring buildings, knocked on doors and gotten permission to shoot from people's property.

The final product, in a lot of cases, is a complete view of the signs that can't be found anywhere else.

"I haven't seen anyone else doing the photos the way I am," Jones said.

Jones has the background required to do such intensive, detailed work.  He has been interested in photography all his life and has used specialized photographic techniques in his varied life's work.

His doctorate in geology from Brown University got him in the door at JPL, and Jones ended up working on downloading, editing, and compiling images of Mars taken by NASA's Viking Lander.

He later worked in movie production under famed director James Cameron serving as visual effects supervisor for Cameron's Titanic and other films.

Now he spends his time chasing down the signs. They are in towns across the country and Jones has photographed about 2,000 of them in 35 states over the last two years.  He has done photos in big cities and small towns and has made three cross-country car trips in the last three years, spending much of the time taking photos.

He's also done work right here at home: there are several ghost signs in Pasadena that he has shot, and he's starting a project on one on the building.

Many of the signs survive in towns where businesses or municipalities lack the funds to fix up or paint over the walls where the faded work resides, Jones said.  In some cases towns have come to see the work as asset and have worked to restore it, a practice Jones actually disapproves of, as he believes it hurts the look of the original work.  He describes the restorations as "Disneyland," a place of fantasy rather than authenticity.

Jones has already begun to see the signs disappear- some he hoped to visit have been reported as being covered up or torn down.  Many others that he has already photographed have since either been painted over or demolished - he estimates that between 20 to 30 percent of the known signs have disappeared in the last five years, either destroyed or restored to a form he no longer cares for.

But sometimes there are also positive developments- new signs are discovered occasionally when another old buildings is taken down and a previously hidden wall reveals a sign not seen for decades.

Jones does not know exactly where his work is going next: he'd like to start selling prints at some point, and make at least enough to pay for his equipment costs.  Right now he does not sell his work, though he maintains a website

In the mean time, he's happy to just keep documenting the signs, as long as they are still around to be photographed.


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