Subway Art
Subway Art is a collaborative book by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, which documents the early history of New York City’s graffiti movement. Originally published in 1984, the book has been described as a “landmark photographic history”. Known by many as ‘the bible’ of graffiti, Subway Art quickly acquired the dubious accolade of becoming one of the most stolen books in the United Kingdom. The title is a reference to the New York City Subway, where a lot of the city’s graffiti was set during the late 20th century. The book features artists such as Zephyr, Seen, Kase2, Dondi, and Lady Pink.
After watching this film at Graff works in Leicester it really helped me grasp the cultural significance that Martha Cooper has within urban arts
Within creating this zine ‘Writings On The Walls’ I could really see myself taking it a step further and turning this into a series visiting different cities in the UK such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leicester, London. Anywhere that has a strong urban art scene and documenting the culture as I feel it could develop into being quite an interesting series as I’m not aware of any sort of publication focusing on that at the moment.
I created my book using InDesign this is a big learning curve as I’ve never used the programme to this extent before but I felt I developed my skills within the programme and put me in good stead to use it in the future. I played around a lot with the composition and positioning of each image and what would work together in a sort of narrative. primarily focusing on visually similar images to compliment each other within the layout my goal was to make it look as professional as possible I’m something that people would enjoy viewing and interacting with.
This image I’ve created is 3 shots of a 35MM black and white film that I shot handheld then in Photoshop overlayered each other to create one continuous I use different levels of contrast and brightness using the histogram of the image to create contrast so it can be seen that it’s three different images put together. what I personally enjoy about the image is it’s paying homage to early graffiti writing as it’s a New York subway train which is what graffiti writers were painting in the 70s in New York which led to this global phenomenon of street art. this was actually painted on a backstreet in Bristol but I purposely tried to take it out of that context as much as possible.
Once I’d printed this image out I then went on to hand draw my own graffiti piece to pay homage to the early works which were painted on subway trains I did this using posca pens as this is the way most coloured graffiti sketches are drawn I tried to make it sit on the border of the image while also being playful with the white border painting drips off the piece. the lettering says ‘MOONEY’ as most graffiti writers have a name they write as the ‘ey’ I put in a speech bubble is with my accent ‘ey’ is also a greeting. I enjoyed experimenting with both black and white and colour in this piece and layering it to add more to it than just the photographic print.