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I have a 'round the hood set and a separate graffiti set, neither of which I've updated recently due to time constraints (not for lack of photos taken). These are from both sets: ≡ Click to see image ≡
I love seeing big wildstyle burners and elaborate memorial murals and stuff like that. Crappy one-color quickie tags, not so much, though sometimes there's beauty in those, too. And I don't think any kind of public art could be all bad.
There's a building called 5 Pointz in Long Island City, across Jackson Avenue from PS1 (and therefore across from my apartment. Inside, it's full of artists' lofts, and outside, it's given over entirely to grafitti (I think it's part proving-ground for new designs, part keeping-kids-out-of-trouble). Anyway, and yeah, I'm breaking the photo Friday rules (I didn't take any of these), but here's the 5 Pointz flickr group, and here are some from Kezam, a tagger I met there while shooting stop-motion sequences for a music video. Here's the tag he was working on at the time.
It's fun to go over to the building and walk around, checking out new tags and watching people work.
The beautiful old market that is the center-point of my neighborhood burned a few months ago. It's being rebuilt, but we all fear it's going to be all boutiquey now. It was a great place with old vendor stalls and a butcher counter and a fish market and bakery and all that:
I love the tree alligator safetyfork! BP I have a similar camera to one you used and the thing that struck me the first time I really examined it was that the shutter speed goes all the way to 8 minutes.
This is a dog. A greyhound dog. The funeral director owns several and pays homage to them with various statues. I think this one is of his first, who is now in greyhound heaven.
Nah jan, he is one of the cats from Monmouth road. For some reason every second house on the street seems to have a cat on the porch.
Here is another. ≡ Click to see image ≡
Urban MetaChatters: do like seeing graffiti everywhere, or does it get old?
The artistic graffiti Hugh mentions above: yes
Clever, pointed social commentary or satire: yes *
Semi-literate territorial-pissing scrawls: DO NOT WANT
*an example: back in the mid-90s, the local hip-hop station, Hot 97, had posters everywhere in the subways. There was one of Mary J. Blige with her legs sprawled out, looking mighty decadent and slutty. I was walking past that poster in the 14th street F station when I noticed that someone had added a quote from The Last Poets:
NIGGAS ARE SCARED OF A REVOLUTION (CHANGE)
If you're going to fuck with public property, please do it in a way that actually improves its appearance, thankyewverymuch.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
