Tag: billboard

Margate: Places, Spaces, Heterotopia I

We arrived in Margate the first week of April, well out of the season so it was really empty, especially in the morning.

In my course we studied the difference between images and pictures, things and objects, spaces and places; where the first item in each pair merely is, whereas the latter has some human significance or meaning.

A heterotopia, again according to Wikipedia, is a concept elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault to describe certain cultural, institutional and discursive spaces that are somehow ‘other’: disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory or transforming. Heterotopias are worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside. In my limited experience of reading about heterotopia, the term is extremely elastic, not to say nebulous, in the way it’s thrown about in art criticism.

Click any image to see them all full-sized.

Advance

Ferry Street, Niagara Falls, Ontario

Continuing along Ferry Street we came to the Drummond Hill Cemetery and the Lundy’s Lane Battlefield Park, both rather beautiful and showing off much of what we’d just learned in the History Museum. Across the street from the Cemetery, on the outskirts of the Niagara Falls Christian Ministries  and in the shadow of the Advance Inn, were these lonely straggler graves, their inscriptions wiped away by history.

Death B.E.D

89th St and Columbus Avenue, New York
89th St and Columbus Avenue, New York

I photographed this tag on a police barricade a week or so ago and assumed it was some sort of a protest note. But now I see it again, in a context suggesting either a broadening of the protest (from the police to the pharmaceutical industry) or that it’s simply a graffiti artist’s handle and I’ll be seeing more of it around the neighborhood.