Post No Bills, first and foremost, grew out of my archive. When confronted with the task of creating a single body of work spanning an entire year, I was truly at a loss in the beginning. I knew that I wanted to utilize 35mm black and white film, finding that I had more versatility in this material, but that was all I had starting out. So, I turned to the work I had made in the previous 3 years, searching for connections that had previously gone unnoticed. What became apparent to me was that a large portion of photographs featured language, whether that was in the form of wheatpaste posters, graffiti, signs posted on stranger’s doors, or commercial advertising. I had been photographing these things unconsciously for a long time, and thus I set out to continue collecting this imagery and try to understand why it had remained so captivating to me.
On the subject of materiality, I chose to utilize 35mm black and white film for several reasons. When I am photographing, the majority of the time what draws me to a particular scene is when there is a high level of contrast. I usually shoot on very sunny days, so that the highlights and shadows are particularly harsh. When using black and white film, I can also manipulate the material in a variety of ways in order to further increase this contrast. Post No Bills was photographed exclusively on Kodak Tri-X 400, which was pushed to 1600, and developed at a longer time with a higher ratio of developer to water. Not only does this process allow for more highly contrasted images, but it also increases the texture and appearance of the film grain, which provided images that were both visually grittier and more closely aligned with the subject matter I was focusing on. These signs and posters were often ripped and torn, or faded from years of sun exposure, and the increased grain allowed the texture that drew me to the scene in the first place to be highlighted. Printing on bond paper allowed for that texture to be further highlighted, while allowing me to create prints which replicated the scenes life-size or larger, without having to worry about production costs.
What I was interested in capturing, more so than the actual content of these posters and signs, was the larger interactions between these physical objects and the community as a whole. The stickers, graffiti, and physical destruction adorning these posters served as a way of saying “I was here,” if only for a temporary moment in time before they were removed, wiped clean, or pasted over. I also sought out handmade signs and posters that took these ultimately consumerist objects and transformed them back into art objects through the form of parody or satire, which ultimately informed the hanging of the work in the gallery and the layout of the book. I utilized the same materials where these objects were found on the street: painting sheets of plywood Hunter Green and then wheatpasting the images onto them in the gallery space, once again subverting the original intentions of these objects and elevating them to the status of “art.” Satire also plays a large role in the hang and in the layout of the book, where I was able to juxtapose images in a way that ranged from overtly humorous to leaving the viewer with a funny feeling.
A feeling that stuck with me throughout the course of making this work was a feeling of dissonance. New York City is loud and chaotic, and I wanted the emotions of the experience of creating these photographs to come across to a larger audience. I wanted the viewer to feel overwhelmed when looking at the work, and achieved this through a variety of means. In the photographs themselves, alongside the imagery of language, posters, and signage I incorporated documentary-style photographs that created a sense of visual dissonance in the viewer, where what is expected to be seen or what is seen at first glance in the image is not what actually appears. In the exhibition itself, I overlapped and collaged the photographs to not only create physical connections between them, but to also incorporate the same overwhelming feelings that occurred during the shooting process into the viewing experience.
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