The Site Survey Project is a series of graphic images created from photographs I took during site surveys for my work at Chesapeake Sign Company.
Original photos were purely utilitarian photos to record some detail of an existing sign or site to be repaired or replaced. No thought was given to artistic composition at the time. I came up with this idea and went back through old site survey photos and picked ones that seemed to have some compositional interest. I then vectorized them through a color trace process using only 3 or 4 colors. Made some tweaks to color sometimes adding a couple more colors by using different stroke and fill colors on an object.
Something about taking a non artistic photo of an object designed for graphic communication that is in decay, then reducing that photo to a few colors and turning it into it’s own graphic and then presenting it as a piece of art says something about the cyclic and transient nature of communication and design. Though I’m not sure what.
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This image is from a section of an sandblasted sign that was falling apart due to poor construction. A delivery person had hit the previous sign and offered to replace it. He did a very poor job making the replacement and it was not long before we were called in to replace it properly.