Life without billboards
From the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown companies started cancelling advertising campaigns. This was mostly due to the decrease in people seeing them while moving through cities and towns, and left most billboards completely empty. This series of images serves as an archive of their disappearance.
At first photographing empty billboards was just a way to make the same old walks interesting again, a type of bird watching but with the inanimate world. Yet over time I found it interesting that the pandemic had limited the ways in which we could desire products. In times of disaster our consumer spirit, often making us dream of a better tomorrow through the purchases we make, is diminished. A simple void cut from the cityscape, while being beautiful, is also like a canary in the mine in that it signals turmoil in the consumer landscape.
The ubiquity of advertising in our lives could lead to the assumption that we don’t notice it anymore, edited out by the brain in the same way it might do so for a persistent and annoying sound. While this received wisdom might be true for some, for most of the population the reality is very different.
It’s only on walking down a street devoid of advertising, that you quickly realise how much of your subconscious is regularly dispatched to secretly work away on deciphering it in the background. An instinctive mental exertion that is subtly stressful. Now, however, taking the place of garish slogans and quickfire bursts of images, many high streets and road junctions are lined with rectangles of simple abstract colour fields that reset and relax the eye amidst the confusion of the streetscape.
As this archive has grown, I’ve come to realise it starts to capture what life would be like without billboards—a kind of utopia. Advertising composes a huge part of the elaborately signalled techno-landscape we inhabit, it drowns people in fictions of every kind while trying to implant previously unknown desires in their psyches. Without all-encompassing advertising campaigns that fight each other to do our thinking for us, what is urban experience like without its pervasive imposition on our thoughts?
