Diane Arbus once remarked, “Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and do what I wanted to do. The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed.” In many ways, the billboard operates under a similar license—an unchecked authority that saturates public space with its images, projecting a vision of desire and success without ever asking for consent. Advertising does not request attention; it demands it, insinuating itself into the subconscious even when we believe we have “blocked it out.”
America’s Bulletin Board examines this omnipresent visual field by juxtaposing the language of the billboard with the casual immediacy of the snapshot. Billboards promise an idealized reality—glossy models, catchy slogans, and hyper-saturated colors—that reduce lived experience to consumable fragments. In contrast, the snapshot, historically dismissed as amateur or accidental, resists perfection; it captures fleeting, imperfect, and often banal moments of everyday life.
This tension recalls the Pop provocations of Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, who appropriated the monumental scale and visual codes of advertising, as well as the critical strategies of Barbara Kruger and the Pictures Generation, who exposed how images mediate identity and desire. At the same time, it draws on the raw authenticity of Nan Goldin or Garry Winogrand, who elevated the snapshot aesthetic into a form of cultural critique. When billboard and snapshot collide, the result is a dissonant visual conversation: one image prescribes how life should appear, while the other reveals how life is lived.
Driving from Miami to North Carolina, I collected fragments of this American visual landscape. By placing candid snapshots against the seductions of outdoor advertising, America’s Bulletin Board seeks to unveil how billboards function as a distorted cultural language—part surrealist dream, part authoritarian directive. They offer us not the complexity of human experience, but its reduction: life as slogan, body as commodity, memory as campaign. The series insists that in order to see clearly, we must place the spectacle of advertising in tension with the accidental truths of the everyday snapshot