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Frank H. Jump is the author of the Fading Ads of New York City (History Press, 2011) and the Fading Ad Blog. Jump’s photographs have been exhibited at the New-York Historical Society, the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, The Gershwin Hotel, and have been featured by The New York Times, The London Observer, Archaeology Magazine, New York Magazine, and many other publications. Jump is an Instructional Technology specialist at the New York City Department of Education and earned his M.S. in Education from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College Graduate School of Education through a grant from the New York City Teaching Fellows Program. Jump is a long-term survivor of HIV and a founding member of the AIDS activist group ACT UP and has been a member of the Visual AIDS archive since 1997 and was the 2012 recipient of the Visual AIDS Vanguard Award (VAVA Voom).
The Fading Ad Campaign began as a photographic project documenting vintage mural ads on building brickfaces in New York City spanning nearly a century. It has become a metaphor for survival for me since, like myself, many of these ads have long outlived their expected life span. Although this project doesn’t deal directly with HIV/AIDS, it is no accident I’ve chosen to document such a transitory and evanescent subject. Of the hundreds of ads I’ve photographed, many have already been covered up, vandalized, or destroyed. But still many silently cling to the walls of buildings, barely noticed by the rushing passersby