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New! Hand-painted, raucous, spotless: John Margolies captures the world's finest dry cleaner.

Spot Cleaners, Madison Street, Seattle, Washington by John Margolies
8"x10" ($40) | 11"x14" ($85) | 16"x20" ($275) | 20"x24" ($675) | 24"x30" ($1,100)


Anyone who has lived in Seattle knows that the city’s history is rich with hand-painted signs…but that only a few token examples still exist. Knowing intuitively that novelty architecture, roadside attraction structures and hand painted signage were all forms of art that might not forever be part of the American landscape, canonized photographer and documentarian John Margolies captured scenes that would indeed end up fading into history. An architectural critic, he saw stark, uniform modernism encroaching on all manner of wacky, personality-rich buildings as early as the 1970s. Spot Cleaners, Madison Street, Seattle, Washington was taken in 1980, and is a visually raucous example of exactly what Margolies loved: something you can’t help but look at because it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Seattleites past and present ALSO know that, although this photo was snapped on a rare sunny (likely summertime) day, most are gray. On those cloudy, drizzly, dimly lit regular days, something very special happens in regards to color. Just as painters often use grey palettes because they visually offset and highlight the vibrancy of the colors being mixed, Pacific Northwestern skies and waters foil and highlight the greens of trees, the yellows of raincoats, and the reds in each berry, galosh, and umbrella. Anything that is not grey takes on an almost animated vibrancy. This is part of why so much colorful signage has been part of the day to day lives of folks living in that part of the country–imagine how shriekingly loud this Spot Cleaners location would appear were everything around it grey, wet, and relatively leafless! There’s no way you would drive past it without thinking to yourself “I actually DO need to get my coat spot cleaned, come to think of it”.

Margolies’s photograph perfectly positions the sign-plastered building center-frame, as if he was photographing a work of fine art, not making one. Like a lot of his documentary photography of surfaces featuring exterior text, Spot Cleaners, Madison Street, Seattle, Washington evokes the work of Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and even at times Jenny Holzer, blurring the line between what is and is not fine art, commercial art, pop art, advertising, propaganda, public work, or something that is part of the art market at all. 

When buildings like this are razed, does it not make us all feel like something more than a structure is being lost? Does it not give us a similar feeling to seeing a work of art ripped up and thrown away? Margolies not only created a massive body of over 11,000 photographs during his lifetime, he made sure that the essence of these American treasures were preserved; that the art itself, at least, persevered.  


More work by John Margolies: