Photographing Graffiti

Photographs have been with graffiti almost from the beginning. When The New York Times did its article on Taki 183 it ran a photograph of his tag. When Norman Mailer wrote his extended essay, The Faith of Graffiti, he was chasin’ Jon Naar’s superb photos. Without those photos the essay would have been pompous and overblown. With them, it reaches the mark.

Now look closely at Naar’s photos (some of them are here). There’s not a single piece (aka masterpiece), as they’ve come to be called, among them. Here and there you see something that’s on the way to being a piece, but none are there yet.

The thing about pieces is that they provide a natural frame to the image. So the photographer doesn’t have to think about composition. Just ‘hit’ the frame and you’ve got it.

Naar didn’t have that luxury. He wasn’t looking at framed art. He was looking at tags on walls, tags and tags and more tags and somewhat more elaborate letters and some shapes here and there. But no frames. He had to do the framing himself. With his eye, in his mind. That takes skill.

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It’s easy to see why pieces arose. Writers wanted to distinguish themselves among their friends and other writers, and, incidentally, to attract the photographers to their work. So they did ever more elaborate work, and, in time, piecing emerged as a distinct form of graffiti, along with tags and throw-ups. By the time Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant published Subway Art (1984) pieces were ubiquitous.

In fact, Chalfant’s studio became a haven for many writers, as Gastman and Neelon explain in The History of American Graffiti (p. 115):

By 1979, he had amassed a substantial collection of images, and when he met DAZE, KEL 1ST, MARE 149, SHY 147, and CRASH at the 149th Street bench that year, he invited them to see his images. For the artists, seeing Chalfant’s professional photography of their work and that of their peers for the first time was an astonishing experience.

At a show at OK Harris gallery in 1980, Chalfant met Martha Cooper, a photojournalist who had found her way into the graffiti scene through the phenomenally talented East New York writer DONDI. The pair began assembling a book together, but also became friends and allies of graffiti writers at a time when graffiti, however spectacular, had few friends in the adult world. Chalfant’s studio in SoHo became a gathering point for writers: Chalfant would share his images and art books with the writers, and the writers would call Chalfant and Cooper to tell them where they had painted a new train in a certain yard so they would know where to go to get the picture.

Then there’s the fact that graffiti on the subway cars didn’t last. Either it was gone over by other writers, “buffed” by the city, or eroded by the weather. Whatever happened, the work was gone. So writers, some of them, took photos of their work. You paint during the night, then you hang out by the track the next day and snap a photo as the train goes by. The photo became the persisting, if not quite permanent, much less eternal, record of the work.

This process went into overdrive when the world-wide-web emerged. Susan Farrell created Art Crimes (the one and only graffiti.org) back in the mid-90s and began collecting graffiti images from around the world. Other sites soon followed. Now the internet’s awash in photos of graffiti. Here’s a bit from Cedar Lewisohn’s interview with Futura 2000 (Abstract Graffiti, 2011, pp. 67):

[Lewishon] The distribution of imagery is one of the biggest changes for graffiti.

[Futura 2000] Now that we have this international medium, the internet, you can see images from every city, and it’s given the community a reference to draw from.

Is it possible to distinguish between graffiti from different cities? Is there a difference between work from, say, London and Paris?

You used to be able to do that. Everything was more isolated. In America, in particular, there was total style between what the Latinos and Californians were doing. They had their own calligraphy. But the graffiti that’s been exported to Europe and ultimately the world is still based on the same kind of style.

Thus, graffiti goes up on a Brooklyn wall on day 1. A photographer drops by on day 2 and photographs it, say, in the early afternoon. It goes out on the web in the evening, where it’s transmitted around the world, instantly. On day 3 similar designs are going up in Sao Paulo, Sydney, and Osaka.

There we have it: 1) paint to wall, 2) image to camera, 3) image to web, 4) more paint to wall, in a different place, the image similar to one on another wall. A complete circuit. A new aesthetic ecosystem. No, a new KIND of aesthetic ecosystem, one dependent on reproduction as no other has been.

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But, alas, the reproductions, the photos, are often weak, sad, lifeless. Not everyone can be a Jon Naar, nor a Martha Cooper, nor a Henry Chalfant. But we can do better.

On two levels. One, technical. The composition can be better, so can the contrast and saturation. These are relatively simple matters. An hour or three of instruction in a short course at the local community college or recreation center, whatever, will fix this.

But there’s a deeper problem. The graffiti’s being photographed as though it were free-standing easel-painted art that just happens to be painted directly on a wall somewhere. And, all too often, the context is almost completely cropped away. The site is rendered irrelevant.

Yes, you can do that with pieces, because they’re made with a natural framing; they’re painted within a bounded rectangular area. The border may not be perfectly straight, it may not be clearly marked, but it’s there. One can photograph and crop to it. When you look on the web for advice on photographing graffiti, that’s what it says, straight-on, maybe a little context, but no odd angles, no fancy stuff. The advice is saying, in effect, imagine that you are in a museum and photograph the painting, and the painting only, not the wall.

But you aren’t in a museum. You’re on a street somewhere in Brooklyn or South LA or Santiago or Melbourne. You come upon the piece at an angle, maybe you don’t even see the whole thing at first. Then you move around it, toward it, back away, kneel down to get a good look at that section near the bottom, now that one up there. Viewing graffiti in the wild is a kinetic experience. You really should have a video camera, but that’s a whole other ball of visual wax.

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So, it’s just you, your point and shoot or your SLR. Do something. Take, three, four, ten shots. Different angles. Details, and details of details. Maybe different times of day, different kinds of light. How about different seasons of the year? What about winter, snow on the ground? How many graffiti photos have you seen with snow on the ground? One, five, eight, none. Most likely that, none. But, the graffiti doesn’t disappear in the winter. It doesn’t hibernate. It’s still there, beaming away.

So photograph it, three, ten, seventeen times over a year, three years, or more (if it lasts that long). Only then will you come to know it. Well.

But you can never know it so well that you exhaust it. There’s always another view, another angle, different light, different weather. As the object-oriented ontologists say, it's always withhnolding itself, always keeping something hidden. There's no way to take a transcendental photograph that encompasses it ALL, at once, FOREVER.

You aren’t photographing a tag, a throwie, a piece, a burner, a production, whatever, you aren’t photographing it so you can tell your children “it was there and so was I.” You’re dancing with it. Make the dance a good one.