The Faith of Graffiti, re-issued with more photographs in addition to the original ones used. All very sharp delicious 35mm – I presume – photographs: the colour tone is sumptuous and the books landscape format helps the display of them also.
There are two essays re-introducing the work, one by ‘cultural critic’ Sacha Jenkins – ‘In a War Zone Wide Awake’ - and one by John Naar himself, - ‘On becoming a Graffiti Photographer’. Naar’s one details how he started out as an artist working in the medium of photography, taking pictures of what held his interest in the city, for example images that were eerily reminiscent of other artworks. He developed his interest via the spontaneous collages that posters sometimes became, before moving onto tagging via the dual shooting of both a poster and a tag in 1972. He was fortunate to have been engaged by a UK publisher Pentagram, and the publisher Lawrence Schiller engaged Norman Mailer to write the text. This book became ‘The Faith of Graffiti’, published in 1974.
‘The Birth of Graffiti’ shows the originals and more of Naars’ three thousand shots he took over a two week period at the end of 1973. For what its worth – and I think it’s worth a great deal – the Faith of Graffiti was to originally be titled ‘Watching My Name Go By’. It somehow feels very important to point out that the work is incredibly political – witness the two yellow tags on a tree on page 138, and the contrast with the municipal benches of similar colours to the left of the photograph - since this can somehow be easily missed viewing the work from the comfort of one’s armchair, as contrasted with actually doing the stuff under fear of arrest or worse
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