In the subway stations of New York, the analog billboards are disappearing — vanishing behind their digital replacements. Where most people see decay, I see a subconscious communal masterpiece: layer upon layer of torn poster, each scrap a fragment of a reality that existed for one moment before the next was pasted over it.

What remains is accidental and exact at once — accident on purpose. A hint of a letter. Half a face. A date. A street map surfacing through a field of peeling blue. These are not designed compositions; they are excavations — part archaeology, part photojournalism, geographically and historically bound to the community whose hands, posters, and weather made them. To photograph one is to read a wall the way an archaeologist reads ground: every layer a season, every tear a hand, the whole surface a record of who passed through and what they wanted.

There’s a name for this. In 1950s Paris, Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains gathered torn street posters and called the result art — décollage, made not by adding but by tearing away. Villeglé never claimed authorship; he credited le lacéré anonyme, “the anonymous lacerator,” the nameless crowd whose tearing composed the image. I photograph that same anonymous hand at work beneath Manhattan. Schwitters and Pollock turned accident into art on purpose; Villeglé found it already made in the street. Fragments finds it underground.

Read together, the series becomes a caricature of culture itself — its character caught in what it left behind. Figures emerge among the remnants. Messages appear between the layers. Patterns surface from the chaos, as if some unseen artist — Basquiat and Matisse’s love child, masquerading as a billboard cleaner in the tunnels beneath the city — were leaving one-of-a-kind work behind, hidden in plain sight. In this latest body of work, that long looking meets a collaboration with machine learning: a new layer laid over the old ones, extending a conversation the city had already begun — a record of who passed through, what they wanted, and what the next moment tore away.

Interested in a print? I print these on frameless, stiff photo board to maintain their billboard essence. Framing is available.