Short Version

Ampersand, a gallery, bookshop & retail archive located in Portland, Oregon, opened in November of 2008. Committed to cultural preservation, we buy & sell vintage photography, paper ephemera, historic documents & collectible books. Our book inventory, consisting of both new & used volumes, is focused primarily on visual content, with particular emphasis on art, design & photography books. Our monthly gallery shows feature either contemporary artworks or curated selections from our vintage inventory. In both cases, our intent is to investigate the colliding point between now & then, past & present, vintage & contemporary.

Longer Version

Ampersand opened in November of 2008. Located on NE Alberta Street in Portland, Oregon,  we are committed to the preservation of vintage photography, paper ephemera & collectible books.

We believe that a collection of photographs, slides or photo postcards, deliberately selected & organized, provides a complex account of the visual language of everyday life.

The same is true of the transient & often incidental paper items that filtered through the hands of people now gone. Old letters, pamphlets, broadsides, menus, identification cards,  invoices, advertisements & postcards (the list goes on & on) convey the little details of human routines that often get lost in broader studies of history.

But the dividing line between now & then, past & present or vintage & contemporary is not as dramatic as we often think. The creative energy of yesterday is manifest in the cultural substance of today. Accordingly, Ampersand is a  project of sorts, an investigation into the colliding point between vintage visual material & contemporary   works  of  art.  As  a   gallery,  we show work that

is informed by (even if only loosely) or derived from vintage styles & materials. Working on the basic premise that nobody’s house looks like a gallery, the space emulates the domain of an eclectic collector; it’s an organized mess of books, objects, ephemera, fine art, design & photography.

The common strain here is an obsession with language (both written & visual) & how our culture uses it to communicate & convey itself. By extension, we are drawn to the angular beauty of printed words & typefaces. Among the many characters in a given typeface, it’s often the ampersand that is most stylistically dynamic, the character most malleable to a designer’s artistic whim. Additionally, the ampersand conveys a sense of continuation or even infinity, as in the phrase “and take a look at this, and this, and this . . .” In other words, we believe it represents perfectly the abundance of material we strive to preserve.

As much a gallery as an internet storefront, our website is devoted to this abundance. We invite you to linger & browse. Ampersand Vintage is open on Alberta Street six days a week or by  appointment. We are always buying old photos, books & ephemera.

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