sourceThe voices of advertisers come at us from everywhere. Radios, T.V.s magazines, websites. They keep coming up with more and more places to place ads. Soon we will all have to check ourselves into institutions to escape from the voices. Millions of people make millions of dollars telling us what we want to hear, asking us to tell them what we want to hear, so they can tell us what we want to hear so that we buy products they want to sell. This is nothing new, and neither is the subject of today's post: billboards. To me, billboards are by far the most fascinating of all advertising methods. For one, there is the proximity to the heavens. As much as we are used to advertising voices filling our airspace, there is no denying that a message that appears to come from the sky, in HUGE writing, is bound to strike up some associations. Especially since billboards frequently rely on declaratives. What could a message from god possibly look like, if not a GIANT DECLARATIVE SENTENCE COMING FROM THE SKY. Another fascinating aspect of billboards to me is the visibility of aging and layering. No other advertising method allows you to see the previously placed pealing messages of the past. I find the layering to be a kind of literalization of time passing as viewed through a progression of images. For someone like me that loves all things old, historical and visual, it doesn't get much better than that. There are also the particular kind of aging advertisements painted on the sides of buildings. These are much more common in Chicago than San Francisco, since Chicago is a much older city. To me these faded messages read as much like ghosts of old versions of neighborhoods as anything ever could.
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