Signs

Winter in Tembisa 1989, Santu Mofokeng

Cheese Matt Siber

The past few days have seen a flurry ot posts concerning projects relating to signs. Conscientious posted about Gregor Graf and his Hidden Town project, Matt Siber and his Floating Logo project and added an image from Robin Collyer.

To balance the concept look at this post from (Notes on) Politics, Theory and Photography looking at signs from a similar but different perspective.

"Billboards have been the medium of communication between the rulers and the denizens of townships since the beginning. The billboard is a fact and feature of township landscape. It is a relic from the times when Africans were subjects of power and the township was a restricted area, subject to laws, municipality by laws and ordinances regulating people´s movements and governing who may or may not enter the township. It is without irony when I say that billboards can be used as reference points when plotting the history and development of the township. Billboards capture and encapsulate ideology, the social, economic and political climate at any given time. They retain their appeal for social engineering. (...) At the high speed of a minibus taxi, the billboards roll by like flipping pages in a book. The retina registers arcane and inane messages about sex and cell-phones, mostly sex and cell-phones. Perhaps this is a coincidence. I wonder."

It seems the influence of signs is global. In economic, political, and artistic terms.