Billboards and me

I’ll never forget travelling by train and seeing the back of a billboard with a couple of people in front of it, but not being able to see the image on the front of the structure. I started photographing backs of billboards in 2002, and it was an ongoing piece of work for a few years, mostly around central London. I photographed about 100 — the basic and most common type is a wooden hoarding structure fixed into the ground with vertical supports to resist winds.

As well as relaying their message, billboards naturally become a curtain for whatever lies behind Each photograph is presented with the slogan from the front as the title, and sometimes this completely contradicts the image of the back of the structure. For example, around the back of “No need to keep the receipt. A diamond is forever” is a scrapheap of old car doors.

The photographs get under the skin of what is presented on street level — even though the products are very slick and hi-tech, these billboards are just very basic structures of bits of wood.

It’s always good to question and turn things inside out — often what we’re given is purely a disguise compared with what’s off the public thoroughfare.

My AA exhibition includes photographs from the Billboards series, plus images of roadworks, trolleys, gallery wardens, urban birds, lost people, and train passengers.