50. Light me up…another item of furniture.



49. Marlboro Country: now it’s time for the real deal

Well I was absent for a few days during this semester, but one of my absences was caused by quick trip out to real life Marlboro Country…
Del Rio, Texas & Bracketville, Texas.
Bracketville is famous for being the location where they built the set and filmed the famed John Wayne movie The Alamo. The set still stands to this day, and 45 minutes to about an hour away from it you will arrive at Del Rio. Del Rio is an area where retired oil money people, lawyers, and high-ranking military servicemen go to retire. Both areas are secluded and known for being places filled with Wild West History involving territory scuffles with Mexico. This area inspires me because it is where many westerns were filmed, and if it were not for those infamous movies, the Marlboro Cowboy ads would not have a backbone.Texas1
If you hop in your car, about close to 2-3 hours away you will arrive at Big Bend national park, which was protected by FDR as one of his New Deal efforts to conserve and create park jobs.

All the locations photographed happen to be MILES AND MILES UPON MILES from each other, so if you run out of cigarettes…stopping by the “nearest” gas station won’t be an easy task.
Also, these areas are untouched by a lot of grubby corporations, the land was purchased by all the filthy rich people in order to stay in-tact & keep them secluded. The people who live in these areas are big on cleaning up after yourself, and what I mean is that even though these people may smoke cigarettes, they pick the butt up and throw it away in a trash can. I mean who could blame them for wanting to protect this beautiful land?
I went to out here the first or second weekend of class, just to visit my grandma and escape. I took so many pictures that it took me a while to go through the ones that I thought would actually be useful for the project. Then after I chose a set, I had to photo-edit them. I wanted to make sure that you as the viewer were equally as stunned by these images as I was stunned when I was there in person.

This area is the real Marlboro Country, this is the Americana we are looking for. I made sure to keep one prominent element in all the pictures…and that element is the sky.

48. The Wall – Final part

So I decided to make old Marlboro ads be the “bricks” that build the wall that Marlboro Sky is trying to break out of. I know that this whole thing seems to be an abstract concept but I chose to use the Pink Floyd concept because cigarettes smokers have typically been a staple of rock & roll. Rock and Roll embodies rebellion, which is something that the Marlboro Sky brand wants to have as a brand element. So instead of using the old school cowboy approach to embody rebellion, I chose the most classic form of rebellion there is…Rock & Roll music.

So now that I have explained it that way, hopefully you better understand the concept behind this whole project. It was a way of trying something new outside of the cowboy while obtaining the goal of the brand image. We still go there! So for my final steps I collected a bunch of old Marlboro ads and had them build up around the blue face as it they were holding Marlboro Sky back.