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For many urbanites, torn posters on telephone poles or blank walls are fly-bys, just visual noise on the way from point A to point B. Not for Byron Beck. In the past decade, he has taken about 1,000 photos of torn posters on the streets of Paris. In April, 50 of them will be on display on Beck’s first-ever fine art show, at Cargo, a global home goods store in the Central Eastside.
The prints are arranged by color and will be up at Cargo all month, starting with an opening reception this Thursday, April 3. There’s Golden Boy, featuring a bearded man in a beanie on a warped and wrinkled yellow poster. In Blind Faith, a rip goes right across a young man’s eyes; in Teeth, four shark tooth-shaped tears eat through the edges of the image, distorting the bespectacled model. The destruction is part of the appeal.
“They’re everywhere, these torn posters,” he says. “You see them in a lot of cities, but in Paris, it seems to be so much more of it. A lot of it has to do with how they put the posters up right over the old posters in the Metro and on the street and either some people are walking around tearing them down or they’re ripping—it doesn’t make sense why they turn out so visually compelling, why they grab me.”
Beck should know. Before he started the torn posters photography project, he was the one ripping the posters down and shoving them in his luggage to take home to Portland as souvenirs. Byron and his husband spend two to three months a year in the City of Light with plans to move there permanently in 2026. (Other ambitions: a clothing line based on the torn posters and a gallery show in London.)
Beck is a longtime Portland journalist, including at WW, where he worked from 2000 to 2008 as the special sections editor and “Queer Window” columnist. More recently, he worked for Commissioner Carmen Rubio in City Hall. When that job ended in 2024, he suddenly had the time to give visual arts a go, a pivot that caught him a bit by surprise. He always loved photography but hadn’t seriously considered bringing it to the masses until now.
“The reality is, I hope I’m a conduit to allow people to see my view of Paris,” Beck says. “My hope is they get to see a Paris that I love.”
SEE IT: Torn Posters of Paris at Cargo, 81 SE Yamhill St., 503-209-8349, cargoinc.com, tornposters.com. 11 am-6 pm daily, April 3-26. Opening reception 5-7 pm Thursday, April 3. Free.