Design
An Artist Finds a Little Bit of Los Angeles Everywhere
Photographer Cynthia Connolly captures the faded glamor of the city's rooftop signage—even in Virginia, New York, and D.C.
The typefaces that people used to use to make signs for buildings—the old signs, the kind of signs that people fight to preserve today—were not the same from coast to coast. The lettering you see on the West Coast is different from the look on the East Coast, says Cynthia Connolly, a photographer who would know. She's been shooting signs on buildings across America for years.
"On the East Coast, all the fonts are these sans-serif fonts that are kind of boring," she says. The photographer grew up in Los Angeles, where the type was more stylish and unabashed: "thick-and-thins," Connolly calls them. The signs for buildings like the Fontenoy. The Chateau Mormont. The Roosevelt Hotel.