sky words: the mundane dramas of roadside signage

On the face of it many of the areas that we walk through or (more often) drive past along highways and main road intersections in America are pretty dull and uneventful places. But the more that I look around, I find these places to be full of little dramas and stories. When we see the signage that occupies much of the skyline in those spaces, we're usually confronted by a dizzying array of advertising and billboards that seek to motivate various kinds of desires and behaviors (consume this, travel there, abstain from this and so forth). But the camera lets us slice those images and words up however we please, which I think can make for some interesting re-imaginings of those spaces. I also feel a perverse pleasure in being able to disassociate words and phrases from their original contexts and intended meanings. When I look at and photograph signage this way, it makes me think of these ostensibly mundane places as eerie, sinister, even. This is especially so when it begins to get darker and the experience of walking through these areas feels a little more ominous. I'm off to the State Fair tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have some photographs of various sorts of food on a stick (covered in cheese, of course) to show and talk about soon.