Billboard Project #4
David Batchelor

David Batchelor ‘Found Monochrome 272’

Higienópolis, São Paulo, 10.09.2007 www.davidbatchelor.co.uk

Since 1997, David Batchelor has been photographing blank, white, rectangular panels that he finds in the streets of the cities he visits. There are currently over 600 images in the series. The monochromes of the street are occasional, often inadvertent and always temporary. For Batchelor they are moments of blankness in an otherwise saturated visual landscape; rectangular planes of nothingness that can also appear as voids at the centre of the field of vision. As such they are like errors: a space where there shouldn’t be a space, an absence where there should be a presence. This photograph was taken in São Paulo, Brazil, at a time when the local authorities had decreed that all billboards in the city should be erased or removed. This was an effort to make the streets less cluttered and more orderly. It wasn’t very successful. DB 20.08.2021 ‘Found Monochrome 272’ is the last of a series of four temporary billboard commissions for Tannery Projects, curated by Nina ShenPoblete, Chinese-born arts producer based in Folkestone, co-founder and director at HOP Projects CT20. www.hopprojects.org