Painted letters on a storefront window cast a shadow reading “2nd Chnce Co” against a backdrop of venetian blinds. The first time I looked at this photograph I spent longer than I’d like to admit searching for the A in Chance. It is not there, but my mind kept insisting that perhaps I’m the one who’s made the mistake. If the lack of an A is intentional it’s good advertising, possibly for a bail bonds company who knows exactly what they’re selling. But the name reaches further than that, into the territory of the optimistic mythological hope carried by all American small businesses. A quality of redemption and a fresh start. The belief failure is not final, that the market is forgiving, that the next attempt will be different. The name is a declaration of faith in an ideology America was built on.
This window is an image from John Lehr’s The Last Things, a book that moves through the American commercial landscape revealing the signage and storefronts made hastily in a rush for attention and abandoned after their usefulness ran out. The photographs are graphically forensic in nature, surfacing the evidence of lives written over lives, one generation’s aspiration painted across another’s failure. The window has been asked to be many things, a salesperson, a promise, a new beginning, a reason to come inside, and it has held all of them, one on top of the other, without being asked if it was willing.
A storefront window carries a certain logic. It is a threshold, the place where inside and outside negotiate. As viewers we are conditioned to look at what lies beyond the window, on to what is on display. It produces desire through glass, making what is inside feel available and aspirational to whoever is outside, the storefront window as the original architecture of the dream of consumer capitalism. But on the other side of this particular window the blinds interrupt the display, providing nothing arranged on the other side to produce any desire. The name on the glass keeps performing its purpose even after the purpose has been withdrawn from behind it. It is the last one at the party who has not been told it is over, a kind of sobering hang over from the dream.
Towards the end of the week I started to think about the person who painted the sign. There is something in a hand-painted letter that a vinyl or printed decal does not carry. The hand was there. Someone stood at this glass with a brush and made these marks. I imagine the kind of courage or desperation it takes to name your business 2nd Chnce Co, to announce publicly that you have already been here and failed and are trying again anyway. The missing A stopped reading as a design choice and started feeling like something that slipped, the letter that holds the word together absent from duty, as if the sign could not fully commit to the optimism it was being asked to hold up for the street. One in five of these businesses will not survive their first year and half will be gone within five years according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The window holds the name up for the street regardless. It was never consulted on the odds.
That willingness is not accidental. It is the product of a myth so well constructed it does not feel like one. Roland Barthes argued that mythology is neither ancient nor fantastical but contemporary and operational, the way culture makes its ideologies appear inevitable instead of constructed. The American Dream is that kind of myth, and the hand-painted storefront sign is one of the places it gets made and remade. Every new sign painted over the previous one is the myth recruiting its next believer before the last one has finished failing. The cycle does not require the myth to be true. 2nd Chnce Co names the cycle explicitly. The second chance is both the product and the promise.
The storefront window was already losing its argument before the blinds were closed. The internet did not just change where people shop. It made the window’s commercial function dwindle toward obsoletion, the original architecture of desire replaced by a screen that follows you home, that knows what you looked at and for how long, that does not need glass or light or a street to stand on. The dream moved indoors and the window was left outside. And yet here it is, stray on the street, hand painted, performing a function the world has unapologetically moved past. What Lehr photographs is the last moment of a particular kind of faith, the belief that a hand and a brush and a name on glass can still produce desire and matter to whoever walks past. The culture has been moving away from that belief for a long time, toward mass fabrication, toward the template, and the screen that manufactures desire more efficiently than any window ever could. The second chance is already the admission that the first one failed. There is no 1st Chance Co. Whoever painted this skipped straight to the redemption and forgot the A.
“2nd Chnce Co” is from The Last Things by John Lehr. Published by TBW in 2024.
Link to John Lehr’s website:
https://www.johnlehr.net/
Link to the book:
https://tbwbooks.com/products/the-last-things
A Week With is a weekly writing series focused on a single image from my art and photobook library. I spend seven days returning to the image and write about what it brings into focus about culture and the present moment.