Underperfoming Billboard Dreams in New Orleans

All billboards in New Orleans in the fall of 2005 were underperforming; if not rendered absurd or irrelevant by catastrophe, erased by the hurricane to blither like old TV screens tuned to grey noise. Many would stay that way for months and years as advertisers had no interest targeting a much depopulated city beset and preoccupied with basic concerns. Closer to the ground, language sprouted. Ugly mass produced plastic signs advertising recovery services proliferated and many took matters into their own hands: for a can of spray paint, shard of plywood and a useful service to proclaim, a person was in business. This book promotes those efforts and imagines the billboard as a site of civic witness, memorial, reflection and marquee for stories from an extraordinary time.

Chris Sullivan New Orleans, 2007