Nice town, y’know what I mean?

by Daniel Dugas

Last year the town of Sackville, in an attempt to bring more people to town[1], installed two black and white billboards on the Trans-Canada highway. The team of marketing specialists believed that the use of a black and white image would create enough of a shock to achieve this goal. This æsthetic action created waves within the community. There were a few newspaper articles and letters to the editor written; some praising the audacity of the signs, and some others were more critical. After a year, I was curious to see how the marketing dust was settling in the ever-windy Tantramar Marsh.

Traveling in a northwesterly direction toward Sackville, I stopped on the side of the road in front of one of the billboards. I had seen the image[2] before, on a previous voyage, but this time I wanted to confront the bucolic scene at a different speed. I got out of the car to stand directly in front of the landscape image. It was huge. The four hay bales lying in a field was even bigger than I thought. The composition of the photograph was centered and balanced. The muted tones and the realism depicted spoke of time-honored tradition and conservatism. The blowup of the image had something of The Gleaners, an oil painting by Millet (1857), but without the peasants.

Looking at the photograph, I was reminded of the famous line by the Stage Manager, the narrator of the play Our Town[3] written by Thornton Wilder in 1937: Nice town, y’know what I mean? There was something warm and safe about it, even if was wrapped in the coldness of the black and white. Under the picture is a slogan stating that Sackville is the Cultural Crossroads of the Maritimes.

Marsh and Mirror

Trucks were traveling down the highway at ferocious speeds raising trails of dust behind them. I was taking pictures of the picture when I realized something both interesting and puzzling at the same time. The billboard image is a mirror of