Dayton Match

Name: OKO Studio & Stephen Levinson in partnership with DDP

Title: "Dayton Match" 

 

Description of the collection:

 

Growing up in Dayton, and learning about our history, we often think about the Great Flood or the Wright Brothers Cycle Shop, or NCR, but—as in any town—we know almost nothing about the quotidian aspects of life: where people ate, where they gathered, where they worked, where they relaxed. People don't tend to take photos of the place they have lunch, or grab a happy hour drink (at least, not before Instagram). Menus, signs, and napkins from these places are long gone. What remains is usually matchbooks. Created as an affordable and practical marketing item, unused or partly used, thrown in a drawer or a fishbowl to sit for decades.

 

When I returned to Dayton after years away, I became interested in my father, Jim Levinson's large collection of matchbooks - most of them from Dayton. I loved looking at them and imagining all these businesses that had come and gone from the same streets I now use. I loved their graphic design—some quite beautiful, and some clearly made by owners who bristled at the idea of paying a designer just to make a damn matchbook. I began photographing the matchbooks and uploading them to Instagram, where generations of Daytonians seemed to enjoy being reminded of essential places from their childhood that they hadn't thought of for years. (Stump's Grocery, Casa Lupita, Bill Knapps). After I'd exhausted my father's match collection, after he passed away, I was delighted that other Daytonians who followed the account began donating and photographing their own local match collections.

 

With the ban on indoor smoking, the era of matchbooks as marketing tools ended too. Though we take more photos than ever before, our social posts are a momentary glow that quickly fades. In the years to come, what evidence will remain of the places where we spend our time?