T-shirts are knitted tubes with short sleeves that stick straight out, the entire thing made on an overlock machine out of, generally, second-rate cotton-polyester fabric.

When I was a kid, t-shirts were thicker than undershirts, and sturdy, and only children wore them. In the late 60s, when we believed we were inventing youth as an aspirational state, we all kept wearing t-shirts and jeans past childhood, but if we wanted writing on the shirt, we mostly had to put it on ourselves.

Now people of all ages wear logos all over themselves; they are often advertising their ability to buy a product or follow a team, rather than saying they are emblems of a counterculture. Companies have sprung up that would print anything on shirts, so you can go back to expressing your identity, even if it’s on a thin cotton-polyester rag that has been thrown together en masse by laborers in a factory far away, then imprinted with a prefabricated graphic design in a hot press.

I don’t wear t-shirts much, because I have decided I don’t look good in them; I am an older woman, so lettering across my chest tends to become unreadable, and graphics across my midriff are overshadowed. Also, I have a square build and a thick middle, so if a shirt fits me in the shoulder, it bunches up or stretches to fit my hips. I have two t-shirts for sleeping in, because they are comfortable; one of them is from a resort I visit every year, and the other is from my grandchild’s elementary school.

This fact of human body variability does not deter other people, so I collect and record other people’s wonderful shirts. They are telling you about themselves, and about what they care for. They are explaining how they defy expectations, and it’s worth respecting that identity even if it is an identity shared by everyone else who bought that particular shirt:

• On tall stooped elderly man coming out of men’s room, I MIGHT LOOK LIKE I’M LISTENING TO YOU, BUT IN MY HEAD I’M LISTENING TO NEIL DIAMOND.
• Man on sidewalk, in blue T shirt. A graphic of a washing machine, with SOUTH PHILLY written across it. 
• On older woman in Moynihan Train Hall: UNDERESTIMATE ME, THAT’LL BE FUN.
• On round man with slightly furry face in a swirly pink Barbie font, BURLY.