During the spring of 2003 I bought my first New York City bike and with it came an unquenchable thirst to ride through as many neighborhoods as possible. I was always amazed by the virtuosity of street artists, writers, in crafting so-called graffiti, or wall tags, throughout New York—the underground language, urban architectural spirit, diligence in throwing up pieces. The heads who speak this language.
I found myself in neighborhood after neighborhood and obsessed with writing, as it is called. I spotted it everywhere—walls, trucks, elevator shafts, garbage dumpsters, expressway ramps, rooftops, post office letterboxes. Souls had bombed everything in sight while we were sleeping. Between April and November of that year I must have taken over five hundred photographs—off to a new neighborhood once or twice a week. Here are a few dozen of the pieces.
I became obsessed not with just the masterworks but some of the banal pieces too, work by so-called “toys”, as well as outlines—it is something about the sparse nature of these that attracts me, they are like rushed, rhythmic preparatory drawings, stark and raw. The ugly battle tags scrawled on top of one another were favorites also, writers tagging over existing work as a sort of diss, or challenge, to other writers.
I was often as taken with the physicality of a spot where a throw-up or piece was done as much as the art itself, the overall urban architectural beauty. These are my personal chronicles of various New York styles, wall hieroglyphics, circa 2003.
A writer who I’d never heard of, “ASP”, apparently died that spring or summer because R.I.P.’s were all over Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. I also remember being nearly jumped by writers in the Bronx, and having a nice talk with a young kid in the Flatlands/Marine Park neighborhood of Brooklyn about how one “gets out of the ghetto”.
The pieces were mainly in Brooklyn (many my then neighborhood of Bushwick), some Queens, the LES, Harlem, lower Manhattan, and the boogie-down Bronx. I never did make it to Staten Island. Think of it as a sort of DispactkéGraffArt. I’ve been sitting on these photographs for years.
.jpg)
For a deeper understanding of (and deeper digging into) the history of graff writing in New York and beyond check out these sources, really just a beginning. A few of these works were instrumental in instructing me over the years into an appreciation and understanding of the writing culture.
Broken Windows by James T. Murray & Karla L. Murray (2002)
Dondi White: Style Master General: The Life of Graffiti Artist Dondi White by Andrew Witten (ZEPHR) and Michael White (2001)
Aerosol Kingdom by Ivor L. Miller
Subway Art by Martha Cooper & Henry Chalfant (1984)
Style Wars, a film by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant (especially the 2003 re-issued 2 DVD set)
Style: Writing from the Underground by Phase 2 (1996)
The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium by Stephen Powers
Spraycan Art by Henry Chalfant & James Prigoff (1987)
IGTimes magazine (International Get Hip Times)
149 st. website, www.at149st.com
Wild Style, a film by Charlie Ahearn
Futura by Futura (2000)
The Faith of Graffiti by Nornan Mailer (1974)
While You Were Sleeping magazine
Mass Appeal magazine
Many years ago a good amount of reading was done on my part through access to the online press archives of the Martinez Gallery. Thanks to Hugo and Erick Martinez for the hookup.
peace, 2010
