DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I don’t know what it is, but I always stop to stare at old-time billboards painted on brick walls. I think it’s not nostalgia, because most of these signs are older than I am. I sure as heck would not have wanted to live 50 or more years ago — if you think it’s hard for server-side web engineers to find work today, just imagine how tough it would have been before, say, they’d discovered electricity.

Anyway, we found this Levi’s wall in Jacksonville, Oregon. I don’t know whether it is a real antique advertisement or a carefully-faded reproduction.

My unretouched photo is a lot less interesting than the wall is. An attempt to restore the image to what I imagined it may have once looked like led to the rekindling of an old, forgotten passion: Photoshop image manipulation. I used to spend entire days doing that. Four years ago I put some of the more finished images (which then were already five years old!) into an online gallery: the pretentiously-named Gallery of Experimental Art. Caution: if you can’t stomach the heavy-handed application of Photoshop filters, don’t follow that link.

I normalized, saturated, and posterized the Levi’s image, then applied four layers of gradient-masked lighting effects, employing multiple edge-detection and texturing filters. The result appeals to me strangely, just like the wall did. A subsequent version, in which I’ve reduced the blue cast of the “copper riveted overalls” lettering, is on its way to the print service for enlargement. I hope I’m as fascinated with the printed version as I am with the digital.