P- How long have you been collecting parking lot tickets?

EW- I started collecting them when I first lived in Philly from ‘95-’98. Philadelphia was really dirty then (as now). The tickets were everywhere, and I couldn’t walk to work without finding one or two. I had never noticed them anywhere I had previously lived.

P- What was it about this particular type of print ephemera that caught your imagination?

EW- At the time I was working as an art director and I spent a lot of time thinking about and using type. I fell in love with the type on the tickets. The form of the ticket reduces the shape of the numbers to an almost abstract form, just a seemingly random series of numbers. Outside of the parking lot, they don’t really have any meaning anymore, and you end up looking at them differently than a sign, or a poster.

They seemed disconnected from anything physical.  They just flew around the city like leaves or snowflakes in a storm. If you didn’t know where they came from, you could almost imagine them falling from the sky, then collecting in drifts in a corner of the Walnut Street bridge.

But there is also an appealing physical aspect of the tickets. They don’t fall apart easily. The paper they are printed on is thick, and if the ticket has been run over by a tire or stepped on by a foot, the paper holds the shape of the asphalt. You can feel where tiny pebbles sticking out of the street embossed the cards like letterpress type on thick watercolor paper.

Then, sometimes they carry scribbles, which are almost always illegible or meaningless. Maybe a license plate number. Or they have a weird little diagram of a car. Or swear words.

What’s appealing to me is the combination of all of the elements: The feel of the paper, the color and size of the type, the total lack of use outside of the parking lot; their near ubiquity on my daily walks to and from work (making them easy to collect); and of course, the technological aspect of the printing. I’m sure they soon will be obsolete (maybe they are already?) or replaced by flimsy paper and thermal printing. My goal wasn’t to save them as a historical record or anything like that, but I was aware they might soon by gone, and wanted to make sure I had saved a few to appreciate.

 

P- Have you ever tried to make anything out of the tickets or do they only exist for you within the collection?

I’ve done a few projects inspired by the tickets.
The one you’ve seen, which was a letterpress version of the tickets.

P- you mean you created a ‘fake’ parking ticket using the letterpress?

EW-Yes, I printed several sheets of them.

I’ve also composed the tickets into cropping close-up of the numbers; creating abstract number forms.
I also scanned in the tickets and printed them out on thick watercolor paper.
All of these experiments revolved around my interest in seeing a non-art objects displayed on a typically fine-art context.

P-Thank you for your time.
It was a real pleasure to see your collection.

 

 

 

 

Ezra Wolfe is manager at a web development company in Philadelphia, he lives with his family in West Philadelphia. Ezra’s collection marks a noteworthy footnote in the history of urban print ephemera, we thank him for his support visual culture minutia.