Tags
Adverts, ancienne France, ghost adverts, old adverts, old French adverts, painted adverts, wall adverts
When I first came to France in the late 1960’s one of the major differences between France and England was that many houses had advertisements painted on their walls. This was obviously more prominent if the house faced onto a main road. The adverts were largely for alcoholic drinks such as Dubonnet, Suze, and Ricard, non alcoholic drinks like Coca Cola, then adverts for petrol, such as Total and Esso but there were also others less common.
When did this form of advertisement stop? It was obviously laborious to paint the advert on the walls. Once it was possible to print large sheets of paper with adverts and paste these up then this would be a preferable form of advertising. Not only would it be cheaper but it would also enable more complex images including photographs to be displayed.
Furthermore when the road system was improved by the construction of the motorway network and the duel carrriaging of old roads then perhaps the days of availability of houses close enough to the roads would have been severely reduced so I suspect this form of advertising died out in the 1960s. However if you have more concrete evidence then please let me know.
I have started taking photos of these old advertisements. They still exist but are now very faded and some are no longer recognisable. In addition because adverts were often overpainted you now get images of two adverts, one on top of another, which is quite confusing.
Recently I took a trip down the N10 from Ruffec towards Angouleme and turned off at several places, for example Mansle to follow the old N10 and take photos of adverts which are still visible….sort of.
With a lot of time and patience it is possible to digitally restore these adverts to something like their original appearance. One has to maximise the picture and then look for a bit of paintwork that looks as near as possible to the original. Then that colour can be copied and cloned across the rest of the advertisement where that colour was used. One then moves on to the next colour and so on till all the colours have been restored and the advert looks something like it would have done the day it was painted.
I have done this for two adverts, one for Total which I photographed in Les Salles Negres and another for Azur which I photographed in Mansle.
If you know where there are any more of these old adverts then please let me know.
I have looked these up on the internet and there is not much info available. There is a site on FLICKR and a couple of others from America. It seems that these adverts are also refered to as ghost signs or fading ads or brickads.
Carollyn Fardell said:
Well done!
They look brilliant. It is so exciting to restore faded signs or relics of the past for those in the present day to be able to appreciate trends of past eras.
One could never have tackled such projects without expertise and special equipment previously. Today we are so fortunate to be able to access programs and skills via the Internet.
poitoucharentesinphotos said:
Well its a bit of a labour of love but once you have photographed the old advert then you have sort of arrested its decline and can then try to restore it whenever you have the odd four hours to kill!
frenchfry36 said:
Well done. And although not painted, it’s still amusing to me (as an Australian) to see houses with billboards on the side of them in Argenton sur Creuse. I wonder how much they get paid?
poitoucharentesinphotos said:
Yes I suppose they must get some form of thankyou, perhaps a free bottle of Coca Cola!
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lechant said:
I’ve been taking the odd photo here & there in our bit of France over the past 7 years we’ve lived here. They’re fascinating, and should be the subject of a photo book! Idea? 😉
poitoucharentesinphotos said:
I had a look on alamy which is a photo site where I put some of my photos and there are a few ghost adverts there. Some are from America and very few from France, there was one though that was quite well preserved and was advertising a local fishmonger and it had some nice paintings of fish such as Pike, and Salmon as part of the advert.
Diane said:
I presume you have seen http://www.ghostsigns.co.uk they have a few French signs. Diane
poitoucharentesinphotos said:
Hello, thanks, I have had a look and it is a big site with as you said quite a lot of photos from France. I will put a link to that site on my post soon.
Thanks again.
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