The Project Begins

A year ago I started to notice to all the large marketing posters, posted on billboards and view-windows in central Uppsala. Up till then I hadn't really paid them any attention, but now I began looking at them and how they interplayed with the urban environment. So I started to photograph them. What I found especially fascinating, was how reflexions of the city and its people merged with the poster models' faces and expressions. After a while on it dawned on me that I had started a minor photo project. This meant that my photography got more focussed on the photographic whole, and not just on the individual image as such.

The Project Ends

After devoting myself on an on and off basis to the project for some twelve months, my photography begun to feel somewhat repetitive, and therefore I decided that the project had come to an end. I had the images – now I had to decide what to do with them. Many, many photographs today, just exist as ones and zeros on hard drives or in "the cloud", and I wanted (some of) these images to get an existence in a more physical form. Thus, with the aid of Adobe InDesign I now have published fourteen of them as a photo book on Blurb.

The Title – "hot lips"

After some deliberation, the book got the title hot lips. This is because most poster models was either pouting their lips or had their mouths half open, showing off their perfect teeth. In other cases they were smiling broadly or laughing with wide open mouths. Anyway, models' "mouths" were obviously playing an important part in the posters' "message". I find the title being quite adequate.

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Preview the book here.

Order it here (preview also available).

Below: the project started with this image.