"Unnamed Billboards": Pictures of Billboards

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week is a series of "Unnamed billboards" by American photographer Mark Hartman, a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology living in New York. Hartman fell in love with a photo in high school graduation class, and the inspiration for him was a teacher who helped determine the cause of life. In the "Unnamed Billboards" series, Mark shows how abandoned commercial billboards look like pictures.

I found these splintered billboards in Panama, the very capital of the very Republic of Panama at the entrance of the Panama Canal to the Pacific Ocean. At first I thought it was a deliberate street art, so exciting it was a sight to see. It turned out that when the lease of advertising space expires, a special team of men comes and strips billboards beyond recognition. There is a small window between the moments when the billboards are being ripped off and replaced with new advertising - I was just trying to get into this gap and have time to photograph these beautiful “tatters”.

In a sense, I acted as a curator, choosing which part of the billboards to photograph. It seems to me that these billboards serve as a kind of illustration of the time in which we live: they talk about the oversaturation of visuality and the bombardment of information. In addition, my series serves as a story about the transience of time and how advertising and images affect the human psyche and his subconscious. Such discoveries are the reason why I became a photographer - I always wanted to express my life experience and observations without words, describing the feeling of place and moment.