Newspaper Billboards

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About Newspaper Billboards

Photos of newspaper billboards or hoardings, in honour of the sensationalist, fearful, dramatic prose used to sell papers. To give a flavour of what the group should be, here is a short interview with Gilbert and George, who have an archive of 2500 newspaper bills, mostly from the (London) Evening Standard, which have been used in their new series of “bomb” pictures.
Gilbert: “We have an amazing selection, in groups: killings, killer, rapes. It’s like an amazing townscape. What’s going on today.”
George: “Even if you don’t read newspapers, you walk down an urban street and you see these messages. It’s like a Japanese haiku.”
George produces an inventory of their collection, where they keep score of the number of words in each bill. The list includes Terror, Knife, Bomb, Dead, Dies, Death, Suicide, Hanged, Died, Beheaded, Slaughtered.
Gilbert: “It’s very good – we don’t have to invent it.”
George: “How would we do a picture called ‘Killer’. Stupid idea. But if you’ve got 15 photographs with killer storms, killer bee, killer on the run, every form of killer, then it starts to have meaning.”
The inventory shows that they have 14 bills with the word “killed”, 16 of “killer”, and 43 in total with some sort of “kill”, though Gilbert notes that they still have a pile of bills waiting to be catalogued.
Gilbert: “It’s just modern life. It’s what’s going on today. In London. Or in the world. It’s like a landscape. You don’t have to paint it. It produces much stronger imagination in your brain than a photograph or a landscape. And they are all written by one person.”
George: “The day we finished the bomb pictures, we went at four in the morning to collect yesterday’s posters, and half of them were in typeface and half handwritten. It varies every day.”
Gilbert : “He must be old, or giving it up, or they tried to move him.”
George: “When he goes on holiday you can see the difference. It’s not quite so good. We also like it, because even in the leafiest suburbs, you see it. We had to go to Ealing Broadway, which is a very select neighbourhood. Tennis courts in their back gardens. Big 19th century houses. But down in the little village, there’s the Evening Standard poster. Very genteel people, but they still have to see that.”