Mark Bradford is best known for his large-scale, painterly collages that use found materials to demonstrate his interest in mapping communities and underground economies. For these intimate prints (part of a larger series on the same subject), Bradford reproduced signage, or “merchant posters,” he gathered from the streets of South Los Angeles, where he lives. The bright posters advertise services from hair care to traffic school in both English and Spanish, providing a small-scale snapshot of a large, diverse neighborhood and its inhabitants. By turning the ads into a series, Bradford calls attention to issues of place and identity, localized culture, class, and commerce. His process for this work involved two separate metal plates for each image—one for the background, recycled from a scratched, used plate, and another for the smaller advertisement, which he traced and marked to emphasize the original poster’s weathered street origins. This smaller print was made using a photo transfer of each poster and then glued and pressed into to the larger print, a process known as chine-collé.
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