Olympia 4548 by Richard Gilles

In his series, Signs of the Times, California-based contender Richard Gilles looks at blank billboards peppered along America's roadsides. A common sight to anyone who's made a roadtrip--or, traveled any amount of distance on a highway-- the boards suggest advertising has expanded beyond it's own capacity for communicating effectively, and serves as a confused medium for encouraging consumption. Photographing those billboards left blank and looming over the varied landscape, Gilles plays with perspective articulating the way the empty signs dwarf buildings in the horizon.

Gilles writes,

In photographing with this new series of photographs, I am exploring what these signs say about us or to us when they are empty. Is a blank billboard an advertisement for an economic recession? Or is it a minimalist object whose message is only that which viewer brings to it?

The images bring to mind Hiroshi Sugimoto's series of Drive-In Theaters, where blank, glowing white screens suggest an other-world, where one is alone with a veritably empty slate on which to impose their imagination. These blank screens, whether at one point showing films or advertising, suggest the impact of visual culture and passive information consumption we engage in. Both suggest the experience can be isolating, even though we're all partaking in it at one point or another.