?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
(BILLBOARD ADVERTISING) An album with 57 photographs by the advertising firm Foster & Kleiser of Portland, Oregon, documenting billboards throughout the city, most of which are graphically highlighted with orange paint. Silver prints with hand-coloring, the images measuring 7 1/2x9 1/2 inches (19x24.1 cm.), and slightly smaller, mounted recto only, with the location, in ink, on print or mount recto. Oblong 4to, gilt-lettered leathertte, twin-bolt binding; with 20 typed pages detailing the benefits and particulars (including traffic patterns, exposure, nearby attractions, etc.) of the locations bound in. 1926-27
Foster & Kleiser Outdoor Advertising pioneered the use of outdoor standardized structures in advertising. The text in this album records their innovative expectation that advertisements be more than incidental posters applied to available surfaces. Rather, the placement, size, particular location, and nearby demographics are all considered as key components of the ad. Several pages of lengthy typewritten text note why a corner or street is a particularly good location, describing traffic patterns, the construction of nearby new bridges or buildings, and cite the number of daily commuters.
Foster & Kleiser's chronicle of their multiple billboard sites not only serves commercial purposes but has a documentary aspect as well, recording the growth of the city as an urban center and the social habits of its citizens. But perhaps most compellingly, the photographs in this album demonstrate a bold post-modern sensibility--the striking use of orange paint, carefully applied to the billboard locations, reads to the contemporary viewer in distinctly evocative ways.
