Just Do It

Tales from the Lonesome City

by Lauren F. Friedman

Opening reception Fri., March 6, 6-8:30 p.m., exhibit runs through April 11, Pentimenti Gallery, 145 N. Second St., 215-625-9990, pentimenti.com. (For more First Friday happenings, read Lori Hill's First Friday Focus column.)

You'd never see it in a tourism brochure, but Philly's streets are bursting with eyesores: potholed roads, shuttered gas stations, broken windows and hollow shells where people once lived. For most, these are just bittersweet reminders of a time when far-flung corners of the city thrived right alongside its teeming center. But artist Matt Haffner sees something more.

"When you drive down Ridge or Germantown, you see leveled buildings with stairways and wallpaper exposed, bits and pieces of someone's bedroom," says Haffner. "The ghosts of this place."

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For the show, Haffner — who was a Philly-based street photographer before moving to Atlanta — came back to his hometown, armed with a camera and an intimate knowledge of the city's architecture and culture. He then took photographs from that trip — of dilapidated buildings, telephones wires, crumbling storefronts, back alleys and train platforms — and layered them under ink drawings of people and things that were not actually there. Beneath a sheet of white mylar, the photographs themselves look doused in milk and not quite real, and the black-line drawings — of façades that have disappeared, children jumping rope in abandoned streets, birds in an empty sky — force you to wonder what could have been.

Take a peek at Matt Haffner's other works at citypaper.net/agenda.