This body of work is a series of photographs shot while walking on city streets. As a photographer, I am attracted to the juxtapositions between advertising, graffiti, litter, textures, and the way erosion blends unrelated images together to form naturally occurring compositions.
Cities are alive with a thriving sub-culture of street art. Spurred on by the success of Basquiat, Bansky, and Fairey, this fugitive art style now flourishes in most urban areas. My aim is not to document this work, but to engage with it as a photographer and find beauty in the random interactions between the city, the people, weather, and time.
There is a tradition of recording the arbitrary marks on city walls, which includes work by many such notable photographers as Brassai, Evans, Levitt, and Siskind. Urban areas are in a constant state of flux and each generation's mark making is unique to their age. In this body of work, I am concerned with photographing the unintended results of chance encounters between posting, tagging, painting, taping, and gluing on city walls and the eventual decay of this activity - and with rendering the temporary permanent.
This project began in December 2009, and it is an on-going body of work. So far, I have made over 2500 photographs in 13 states and 17 cities. The images are full-frame, with no manipulation except to dodge, burn, and adjust color and contrast in Photoshop. By photographing with a macro lens, that focuses as close as 2 inches from the subject, the images represent small fragments of the world greatly magnified when printed.
Each photograph is 16 x 28.5 inches in scale, and when combined, images are presented side by side with edges touching. The body of work consists of large-scale grids, diptychs, and triptychs, mixed with singular photographs to create variations in scale and emphasis.
Photo Credit: Rene' West, Arrow (Albuquerque) from the series "City Walls" © 2010