A digital photo collection hosted on Tumblr, Things That Say “No” captures and categorizes publicly posted messages that dictate “no” to each T rider, patron, passerby, and everyday Bostonian. Enabling a viewer to scrutinize each train platform, bank, park, street corner, and cafe at which they themselves could be told what not to do, the photographed messages reveal a collective rhetoric for how order and control are maintained in Boston’s urban environment. The collection seeks to study, understand, and question the discourse in which city-dwellers find themselves submerged, often without their attention or awareness.

As a whole, these digital photographs paint a picture of the federal, state, and municipal laws; capitalist business concerns; and shared social values that exist in Boston’s dense and, at times, chaotic metropolitan landscape. Since the cross-section of signs appear to reflect cultural interests in public safety, health, and transportation; business operations and consumerism; and private property, all of which are typically dictated and enforced by laws and social practices, each photograph has been categorized based on one of these interests. In this way, the collection examines the publicly posted sign as a symbol of power, often delivered by a public or private institution.

Within this context, Things That Say “No” strives to draw attention to the ways in which citizens’ free will is restricted by the public agencies, businesses, and even individuals whose lives intersect with ours, as evidenced by these public postings. Constantly “hailing” us as citizens and consumers, these signs—posted by “the powers that be”—tell us again and again how to behave. With posts labeled with locations and the times and dates captured, each photograph serves as evidence for a moment that I personally was “hailed” by one of these messages. The collection offers the temporal and physical location of each interpolation to show the persistent and inescapable presence of these power structures.

This collection also examines the object of the publicly posted sign that says “no” by categorizing each based on its material presentation. These characteristics too seem to reflect the power (or the imitative presence of power) that these institutions have over their messages’ audience.

Since each photograph was captured and categorized by me, one individual citizen, the collection also talks back to the entities that posted these messages. Taken on various commutes using a humble iPhone, the photographs call the political structures they belong to into question through the radical act of collection. The photographs become part of a private archive—mine. In this way, the power that these signs reflect is co-opted or undermined. The messages become part of a personal experience, the signs objects to be considered as material and memory. The photographs in Things That Say “No” could fit into an archive curated by Public Works, the MBTA, or the Parks and Recreation Department, or perhaps be of interest to researchers examining urban planning, public transportation, or property law, but their existence outside an institution makes them politically radical. The collector herself says “no” in return.

http://thingsthatsayno.tumblr.com/