Willie Baronet is an SMU professor who for 20 years has bought cardboard signs from homeless people. He has mounted exhibitions using the signs. Mike profiled Baronet in our September issue. Highly recommended reading. So it came as a surprise when a friend sent me this story in the Guardian (which first appeared here) written by a New York photographer named Andres Serrano. It begins thusly:
“Sign of the Times” was conceived in early October when I started to see what I perceived as a greater number of homeless people in New York City. As a native New Yorker, it surprised me because I had never seen so many people begging and sleeping on the streets. It occurred to me to start buying the signs that the homeless use to ask for money.
You can’t trademark the idea of buying signs from homeless people. And I’m not suggesting that Serrano saw what Baronet was doing and copied him. But, you know. Weird, right?
