i went to nyc this past weekend to hang with my girlies, maria and kel, and just wander around manhattan. and we went to the bronx and astoria. lots of traveling. walked a lot, did some minor shopping, and mostly just hung with the girls. we were all kind of tired and poopy but just laying around maria's place petting sphinx is fun. almost like the mod... only not.
anyways. during my wanderings i took some pictures of nice graf in soho. and now they're on flickr...
i've been digging graffiti for a quite a while and my interest has increased significantly in the past few years. i now constantly scope the streets for new pieces and point them out to my family and friends.
walking down a city street (and even driving down a country road) can always be interesting and art filled. for me graffiti is a great modern art form. i'm sure people have been tagging up walls for ages, scratching their names in trees and under desks. since the 1980s tagging and wall art has flourished across the US, both legally and illegally.
i appreciate it every day. each morning on my drive to work through allston, ma i'm able to graffiti-spot for a couple of blocks before i get on the highway. on trips away i spend time wandering around neighborhoods just looking for something different. graf is totally public art in its rawest form.
when i find these interesting pieces and i take pictures of them. i have gigs worth of pictures of street art. pasteups, tags and stencils. if i see it, i like it and my camera's handy i like to catch a pic before it gets painted over or washed away. another great thing about street art is it's limited lifespan. because these pieces are thrown up on walls allover the cities, they come and go at the will of the people. so communal. even if the community police try to wipe them out... all part of the circle. by taking a picture i have that piece captured on my hard drive even if someone else eventually/inevitably paints over it.
so anyways.
i take a lot of pictures and i like to show them to people. so i've turned to flickr as my website of choice for sharing my pictures with people i know and people i don't. opening up my graffiti archives for the world wide web to see.
flickr is a great place for tagging and searching pictures. through this foto-friendly community i've found pages of some of my favorite artists. the fact that i can take photos of these seemingly anonymous pieces, put them up on the site, and then have artists wander around and claim them as their own is fantastic. another benefit is that i'm able to wander around the collections of my fellow graf-lovers and see where they've been and what has caught their eyes.
it's like a team effort to photo and id all these artist around the world. a giant easter egg hunt, if you will, on the streets and on the sites. surprises around every corner, and yet sometimes, nothing interesting at all.
now i'm rambling.
whoops.
anyways. i love graffiti. flickr is a great site for fotos. and my new camera add-on's are in the mail. yay! new filters and a hood by the weekend - woohoo! i'll be back on the streets and snapping away asap.
right after i pack up my house. my tons and tons of crap.
our move date is 3 weeks away and my room/house is a dirty disaster. i need to get my booty in gear and packing. really. cos i'm moving. out of this house on aug 31. and to texas... sometime... semi-homeless for that middle part but no worries. no worries, no worries, it'll be ok.
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i packed 3 boxes worth of books today. actually, rach packed one for me and cracked the whip to make me pack the other two. dang. 3 boxes of books packed up and still SO much stuff to go. this sucks.
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