A billboard on six weathered wooden posts stands alone on a graded dirt lot, its face a bright collage-lettering design in the old large-letter postcard style — each letter filled with a photograph of a local landmark: the star-shaped skeleton frame, the drive-in installation, the mirrored sphere, the "you belong here" panel. Behind it, a hard blue desert sky, a bare utility pole with lines running off frame, and a long ridge of banded red and grey mountains standing above the low green scrub. Highway 111 cuts across at right. Everything below the horizon is dust, tire tracks, and creosote. This is the welcome billboard at Bombay Beach on the east shore of the Salton Sea in California's Imperial County — a community sitting below sea level, once a resort town, now better known for the art installations pictured on the sign itself.
The photograph works because the sign is more colorful than anything around it, including the place it's advertising. Bright saturated graphics against sun-flattened desert, with the wooden posts and the raw lot underneath making clear how much effort went into the greeting versus the setting. It's a straight-faced document of roadside Americana that carries a little dry humor without editorializing. Suits an office, a hallway, a studio, or any wall where desert Americana fits, and it prints large well — the individual photographs inside the letters stay readable.
