The Reverse series started by accident. Santiago, 2023 — walking behind a row of large-format billboards on the edge of the city. The backs were extraordinary: rust patterns, stencilled numbers, layers of repair, bolts sheared off and replaced, weather damage that had been repainted over and painted over again.
Nobody sees the back of a billboard. The front is designed for maximum visibility at speed. The back is designed for nothing — it just accumulates.
What I was looking for
I was looking for surfaces that had been worked on without aesthetic intention. The marks on the back of a billboard are functional — a number to identify the structure, a patch where the metal failed — but they read as abstract composition. The rust gradients are as considered as anything in a painting, except they weren’t considered at all.
Santiago and Asunción
The first two prints are from Santiago and Asunción. The Santiago piece is vertical — a tall narrow structure, the rust running in long vertical streaks. The Asunción piece is square, more compressed, the stencilled number still legible.
Both are archival pigment on Hahnemühle Photo Rag. The surfaces were photographed at close range to flatten the perspective and emphasise the texture of the metal.
Edition
Editions of 10. This is a smaller edition than most of the work — these are the most particular images in the archive, the most dependent on the physical surface, and it seemed right to limit them accordingly.