The Beautiful World Of Graffiti

Grafitti is the way that a society talks to it self. That's the theory of Axel Albin and Josh Kamler, a couple of designer from San Francisco who started photographing examples in the area around their studio and then became infected by the idea and became a garner examples from all around the world.

If grafitti is a kind of conversation its a pretty solipsistic one, a dialogue of the deaf, pepperes with Pinter pauses, for there are none so deaf as those who will not listen. The standard polarity is between those who insist that grafitti is a modern art and those who think it a vandalizing nuisance.

There,is , of course, something about grafitti that humanizes. The oldest ones maybe were in the Ephesus, the Greek city shaken to ruins by an earthquake AF614. The scratching in the great white stones , were an antique advert for a local whorehouse. In Pompeii the scorching ash wiped out human life but preserved the drawing and phrases etched into to the wall. recording abuse of the powerful magic spells, decaration of love, smutty aphorisms. They are mere the marginalia of a culture but they summon as in dreams the voices of long since buried men and women.

In the old days it was blade on stone , though in a gatehouse of the Windsor Castle , where a tiny initials A B in a pane of an ancient sagging glass,, they were scratched by Anne Boleyn, with her diamond ring , as she waited transfortation to the Tower of London.

Rebellion is at the heart of grafitti which, by defination, is inflicted on someone else's property.

That revolt can be political, as in the words once daubedon the Berlin wall or the images on the todays Israel security barrier. It can be brave, like the anarchist's " Against all authority", in Tehran, " Price Roll-back!' , " Oust Gloria", in Manila...

But its joy is its evanescence. It is , like life it celebrates, impermament, " Please Don't take this sticker down," said the sticker in Marikina., but somebody will. Somebody will. Whatever it is Grafitti is part of our cultures,. it embeds the past and the present...