Ms. Opton's 'Soldier Billboard Project' FREE-SPEECH RIGHTS in Minneapolis-St. Paul

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Battles Over Billboard Space Precede G.O.P. Gathering

By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: August 29, 2008

The images are seductive in their simplicity: close-up, larger-than-life photographs of the faces of American soldiers between tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The faces are horizontal in complete repose, the eyes wide and gazing vacantly.

The New York-based photographer who took the pictures, Suzanne Opton, had hoped to show five of them — one on each of five billboards — around Minneapolis and St. Paul during the Republican National Convention, which opens there Monday. “It’s about engaging the public,” Ms. Opton said. “We just felt that people don’t know the sacrifices made by the military and a small handful of families.”

Ms. Opton’s photographs, part of a series called the Soldier Billboard Project, have been displayed on billboards in Syracuse, and one was on a billboard in Denver during the Democratic National Convention. But the company that owns the Minneapolis-St. Paul billboards, CBS Outdoor, part of the larger media conglomerate, canceled her contract last week, having decided that the pictures sent a confusing and inappropriate message.

“When we looked at the images,” said Jodi Senese, the company’s executive vice president for marketing, “the soldiers depicted clearly looked to us like they were representing deceased solders.”

Separately, the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board on Thursday denied a group of political activists a permit to create a large antiwar video billboard near the Capitol in St. Paul. On Friday, the group, True Blue Minnesota, won a stay from a judge who is not expected to issue a final decision in the case until Tuesday or Wednesday, meaning at least a partial victory for the activists, who never planned to have the billboard in place for more than the four days of the Republican convention anyway.

Still, the two disputes have raised concerns among some that Republican sensibilities are taking precedence over the public discourse that Ms. Opton says she had in mind and, in the case of True Blue Minnesota, even over free-speech rights.

“One gets suspicious about it,” said Susan Reynolds, co-director of the Soldier Billboard Project.

Ms. Reynolds said her suspicions were all the greater because the CBS Outdoor contract, signed Aug. 8, was not canceled until last week, leaving the project with little time to find an alternative billboard company.

Ms. Senese, of CBS Outdoor, said that in the days just after the contract was signed, the company was vetting business concerns regarding the project and so did not concentrate on the art itself.

“We don’t object to the program or the art,” she said. “Our only concern is that people driving on highways at 55 or 60 miles an hour, seeing an image like this popping out of nowhere, it could be disturbing.”

“Gigantic, larger than life,” she said, “just heads with blank eyes staring out at you. It’s haunting and very provocative in a museum, but on a highway it’s consumed differently.”

As for the rejection of True Blue Minnesota’s video billboard, Nancy Stark, who is on the staff of the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board, said size, not content, was the reason. The board, Ms. Stark said, has longstanding rules against oversize signs.

“The vote was not based on content,” she said. “It was being reviewed as to how it fit with the rules.”

But one board member, State Senator Sandra L. Pappas, Democrat of St. Paul, disagreed.

“It was very, very strange that this would not be granted,” Ms. Pappas said. “I was pretty shocked and appalled, and spoke up strongly. The images that they were going to portray were very antiwar and critical of the administration. I don’t think there was any justification for denying it.”

The court is to decide next week whether the board’s decision was content-neutral.

The photographs of the soldiers were taken by Ms. Opton at Fort Drum in upstate New York in 2004 and 2005.

“I wondered, ‘Can we see it on a person’s face when they’ve seen something unforgettable?’ ” she said in an interview. “What I wanted to do was take an intimate and vulnerable picture of a soldier.”

“They may look troubled,” she continued, “but it’s not easy to be a soldier. Why should that be hidden from us?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/us/politics/30billboard.html?partner=rssuserland