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Why graffiti? |
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My first introduction to graffiti came in about 1992. I was in Toronto, visiting an aunt who lived at Brunswick and College,
and she happened to point out a wall upon which somebody had spraypainted a man holding a flower. She told me that there were
huge murals of the stuff around, better than this. I saw some of those murals in 1995, when a friend of mine, Odie, took me
on a tour of the alleyways. The camera I had at the time was a cheap little 110, and so it didn't occur to me to take pictures
of them. Happily, in 1996, someone close to me noticed that although I loved photography, I had no decent camera, and conspired
to present me with my first 35mm camera. |
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In 1997, I went to New York with two friends, and while we were there, we found a stretch of graffiti just off Broadway that blew me away.
I had my camera with me, so I took photos of it. I'd appreciated graffiti before, but little did I know that when I got back to Toronto
and developed the pictures, I'd be hooked on photographing it. I wanted more, and I was kicking myself for having overlooked the wealth
of graffiti that had been all around me in Toronto all those years. |
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It wasn't the same back then as it is now. There were no widely-advertised and highly-sponsored expos for preppy kids to show up at with thousand-
dollar cameras, take a few pictures and go home, feeling part of a scene. What gatherings there were seemed to be word-of-mouth. To access some of
these places, I had to crawl under fences and freight train cars, climb trees, walls, and fire escapes, run from security guards, dogs and cops,
even hide in marshes. There's pride in that, sure--I earned those photos. Though it's just as illegal now as it was then,
it's a lot more popular, a fact which some attribute to the burgeoning local hip-hop scene.
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The earliest photos were taken with a Pentax Espio 100, on Kodak, Fuji and Ilford films, usually between 200 and 400 speed. In 1999, I was injured
on the job and could no longer afford film or development costs. This is why there are no photos listed between 1999 and 2003. In 2004, I was given
a Canon A60, a nice little digital that, much like my old Pentax, was small enough to go anywhere, but big enough to take some reasonably good pictures.
Unfortunately my apartment was broken into in 2008 and they stole my camera. I replaced it with a Nikon D40, and I use a mix of digital old film lenses.
I use Canon Photostitch to assemble the larger panels of images, and the older photos were scanned in using an HP Scanjet 5200C, and cropped in Adobe
Photoshop. |
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While I hope you enjoy the great colours in the pictures, and the humour that these artists frequently display, I hope you'll bear in mind the time
and energy these people put into those pieces, the political nature of boredom, and what the difference is between vandalism and art. There may be
a time and a place for art, but what's more appealing to look at, one blank and isolating concrete wall after another, or vibrant murals like these?
Art reflects the nature of the society from which it was born, and we can learn a lot about ourselves from what these people have to say.
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