© Dorothy Bohm

This close-up photograph of a billboard hoarding is one of a series of works featuring torn posters, graffiti and other urban ephemera, which the photographer captured after observing, then waiting (sometimes months) for it to 'mature'. The resulting partly eroded and weather-ravaged poster resembles, in its distressed condition, a strongly coloured and multi-layered collage. Although the original meaning is lost, the possibilities are multiplied as each fragment hints at past dramatic events. The inclusion, for example, of a head thrown back in agony (lower left) from Picasso’s Guernica (1937), expressing his horror at the bombing of the Basque town by Franco’s German allies during the Spanish Civil War, juxtaposed with the face of a woman wearing a soldier's helmet (upper right), is a disturbing intimation of conflict, somewhat offset by fragments of sky and landscape. The torn poster is part of a powerful group of works which represent, as Monica Bohm-Duchen has commented, ‘a palimpsest of contemporary western culture which forcefully conveys its fickleness’.