Any urbanite who walks down most city's major thoroughfares are familiar with seeing glowing billboards with ads for Gucci bags at their bus stops, or parking lots aglow with signage for new cosmetics, fast food, storage space and movies. But, to how many of these signs do we really pay heed, to how many of these companies do we become customers, and how much of this omnipresent advertising is really worth the cost of putting up these media-driven images in the first place?
Rainsford Road, 2010 by Janet C Taylor
In an article several years ago in the New York Times, Glenn Collins reported that Times Square would be getting its first solar-powered billboard. Coming in at 35,000 lbs, the sign would be fitted with 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels, and was projected to save $12,000 - $15,000 a month in electricity bills. Imagine the savings if all the LEDs that comprise the hundreds of thousands of billboards around the world were to follow suit.
Contender Janet Taylor, who spent two decades working in computer graphics, interactive media, human computer interfaces, typography and game design, thinks a lot about words, images and signs. She lives and works in Toronto, and has embarked on the series Significant Presence to address "the ubiquity of media images in the urban environment." She photographs at night, and in black and white, which serves as one means of preventing the saturated colors of ads from reaching us. She also makes long exposures, which effectively strips the lighted signs of any identifiable words or images, making them, as Janet writes, "meaningless and yet more apparent."
Shelter, 2010 by Janet C Taylor
She photographs both city-center and on quieter, residential roads—places where we so often see advertorial images that we fail to process their existence until we're made aware of their absence. Taylor highlights what this kind of void might look like, and in doing-so, points out how much visual and physical real estate we forfeit to commodities.
To see more work from Significant Presence, head over to Janet's website.