Being a street lettering documentarian spouse
Pooja’s first book, India Street Lettering comes out this weekend after a hugely successful kickstarter last year, and an unusually impressive amount of fanfare for a debutant author. The success of the book, even before it has been released, speaks not just to the work done in the last year, but the scale of the project and the much deserved attention public and media it has enjoyed at least for the last eight years, and I could not be any more proud.
I write this on a flight from Brussels to Bangalore, for a quick 48 hour trip to India to attend the first book launch event at Champaca Bookstore, an opportunity to celebrate with our friends that I would have regretted missing. That much of this book was made over a year in which we have were navigating a lot on the personal front, including relocating to another country, leaves a bittersweet feeling. Doing this on a tight deadline with so much going has been no mean feat on Pooja’s part, which I am sure, after things settle down, she can look back at with some pride. But, doing this under so much pressure severely limited our ability to enjoy this experience. And doing the promotion of the book under a shorter, tight relocation deadline may inevitably deprive her of being able to properly revel in its success. While the past year has been so busy that we have had little time to reflect on it, as I sit awake with excitement for the weekend ahead in this long flight, I cannot help but reflect on the years observing Pooja’s documentation leading up to it.
*******
The experience of being the partner of a street lettering documentarian in India has also been a uniquely educational one. Since 2013, I have enjoyed a ringside, behind-the-scenes view of this documentation, one that has irreversibly altered my own approach towards experiencing a city.
Aside from choosing to write my law school projects in Garamond, and my work emails in Georgia, I had no interest in typefaces or lettering before I met Pooja, least of all any appreciation of lettering in Indic scripts as part of our visual culture. As I began accompanying Pooja on her lettering photography excursions over a decade back, what most intrigued me was the signs she chose to document and the ones she studiously ignored. In those early years of my exposure of street lettering we would be out with her camera, and I would often point out a street sign which caught me attention. Almost every single time, she would have no interest in them. In my head, I gradually went through and discarded the filters that my untrained eye was fixating on — colourful signs, gimmicky lettering, anything that I mistakenly perceived as Art Deco inspired lettering. It took me a couple of years to develop any confidence in my own second-hand design education to start engaging in more active discussion with her about the choices she was making. I had perused some of the more introductory type design, and western type history books in our home library to build some theoretical frameworks to locate fonts I was seeing around me within a wider art movement.
In 2017, Pooja ran her first type walk in Paharganj, Delhi, and just being around it accelerated my education about prominent styles used in hand-painted street signs. One of the exercises in this walk was a type bingo card that Pooja had prepared as guide to identifying styles we saw in Paharganj. That game stayed with me for months, I found doing a mental taxonomy of hand-painting signs (or as I realised later, even fonts mimicking them) whenever I was out. The next step in my personal training was being able to distinguish these fonts from actual lettering.
In parallel, the other thread in my training was being able to appreciate how material influenced lettering. It was perhaps a testament to my having paid so little attention of materiality all my life that I found myself to be terrible at even identifying from a distance, the material used in the construction of an old sign. I constantly mixed up metal and wood, and sometimes concrete as well. Until paying close attention to the wood signs that Pooja documented in Panjim, I had not paid any attention to the fact that good wood signs (much well-crafted furniture) would often be rounded and sanded with no sharp edges. Then a few years later, in Kolkata, I realised that this was also not a rule, with the old city replete with wood signs with sharp edges.
The interesting thing about street lettering documentation in India is that much of our urban spaces are replete with homogenous, uninteresting flex signs. Often the signs worth documenting that one finds are the ones gracing old, dilapidated buildings and structures. Actively looking out for these signs and structures in a state of decay and disrepair was a really unique way of exploring a new city. In the last decade my experience of Chennai, Pune, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Kolkata, even parts of Bangalore and Delhi (places where we lived) was walking through old, often poorer neighbourhoods. Sometimes these neighbourhoods had old street signs because they were culturally and economically still existing in an earlier time, and but for this documentation, we would have had less incentive to go exploring them on foot. In some of the cities like Bombay, Kolkata and Lucknow, when the weather was not too unforgiving, I loved the afternoons spent walking in old neighbourhoods, enjoying the lettering but also the architecture which tended to go back and forth between Art Deco and mid-century modern or some blend of these two styles that, in an earlier time, this country seems to made its own.
Every new type walk that Pooja ran in the last eight years added another element to my education — appreciating black lettering Latin lettering in cemeteries, the fast disappearing neon signs or brutalist-modernist lettering signs in metal and concrete to reflect the aesthetic that marked the early national building of independent India. Slowly but surely, my worldview was influenced to include design and visual culture as a lens to understand the world around me.