In these square sixteen inch black and white photographs, a toothy-grinned person is depicted looking directly out at you, but these are advertisements on the backs of bus stop benches and billboards tucked into the Tampa landscape—a picture within a picture. The series came out of a recent trip to Tampa. In Tampa I was struck by all of the local outdoor advertising and its reliance on using a portrait of the business owner, or the happy customer, to sell their service. In these photographs I have isolated the banal, often unsophisticated, portrait into one part of the frame and show just enough of the Tampa landscape to provide an environment for the figures. I flattened the space between the background and the figures in the ads so that they appear to be physically there—creating a new context, a new image of my own making.

I am interested in the nature of these advertising portraits (their surprising lack of sexuality, the production of trust through self representation, and the depiction of class through expression, gesture, and costume) and how they confront the viewer in my new photograph against my background. A clean cut young black man with soft eyes and a wide smile who once provided a reassuring face to a commercial service now stares from behind a razor-wire topped wall. The manipulation is real.

Grinning white-trash men in polyester suits. The hand-on-the-chin trope. Vernacular advertising against strip mall signage. The Florida hairdo. I was not motivated to make fun, or pass judgement on the people portrayed in the ads—though many of them can be funny or sad or conflicted. They are not camp. But like the eponymous photographer in the movie Pecker, I will not deny that I have delivered these ads to the scrutiny of a more sophisticated viewer than their producer. In the ads sporting a professionally lit studio portrait nicely silhouetted against the background, their smiles and their gestures remain as masks. They are like so many other images from advertising, or perhaps they could remain so if it was not for the unfortunate ill-placed bolt protruding from their neck or the used car lot behind them. Contrast these with the simpler portraits that look as if they were taken at the passport photo studio, by Olan Mills, or culled from the family vacation photos. Their smiles and stiff gestures betray a jarring vulnerability. What are they doing out there ?