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CONSIDERATIONS:
The idea of a proper place to display art is generally restricted to museums or art galleries – closed spaces where the object is protected from any kind of aggression. Photography, which has gained the status of art due to its physical fragility and increased economic value, is confined to closed spaces designed for its preservation. It has become inaccessible to the gaze of most people. As a consequence, its capacity to enhance the development of ideas, emotions and interactions are restricted only to a few who have favorable means to buy it, acquire books to learn about it or to find it in its "sanctuaries."

Pre-historic paintings as well frescos had and continue to have a place and a social function as forms of communication in artistic expression. They were created to spread ideas, and their placement has always been in spaces where the largest audience would be reached.

In its turn, the display of billboards is implicitly linked to advertisement campaigns. Some of these modern murals are contemporaneous versions of old frescos and deserve qualification as art, although they have to be seen as instruments to produce consumption.

Photography, to most people, is still just a technical media to reproduce images, to document facts, to register moments and to keep memories. To a large majority, its place is a photo album, a wallet, a picture frame, a newspaper, a magazine, or the screen of television or a computer. It is either a personal relic or an accessory for sale and profit. To most – to whom art is something difficult to understand because it is outside of their reach – photography is not art.
When a photographic image is transported to a public space, with equal dimensions and support as that given to a commercial billboard, it breaks free from confinement. It airs itself out and stretches the public concept of photography.

STRATEGY:
The installation of a photograph as a billboard in a building located at a main crossroad. Smaller reproductions of the same image will be placed in strategic corners of the city – such as bus stops, malls and coffee shops – in order to further the curiosity for the image being exhibited. A study will be done as to how the image has impacted people - video taping public opinion regarding the image and its relation to photography.

REQUIREMENTS:
City permits and a large scale billboard (approximately 30 x 21 feet) with a sound structure and electrical frame to withstand the weather and the weight of the printed plastic material.
The proposal is that the city would co-sponsor the project that would determinate the use of such a structure for future public display of artists’ works on the same scale.

ADDED CONSIDERATIONS:
Within a gallery space, there could be a display of other images that were taken during a year of work for the popular Brazilian newspaper "Folha da Tarde," with the theme: common denizens of São Paulo and their relation to the urban landscape.