Francisco de Pájaro got down with this little sculpture in London. As Dave showed earlier this month, Francisco does a lot of these sort of found-object street sculptures. I particularly like this one because it’s art trashing art, made of trash. His work is really funny and quite genius at times. Check it out here.
Photo by tiptoeSOMA
Caroline and I are headed to Chicago today. We’ll have a few days to explore, so any suggestions are appreciated. Here’s your links:
Photo by pareto8020
Back in 1976, Nic 707 founded the Bronx-based crew OTB, and, along with his crew, regularly hit the trains. These days Nic 707 is back on the trains. But his interventions, this time around, are eliciting mostly curiosity and expressions of gratitude form subway riders. I accompanied him last night on his Instafame Phantom Art Project. Here’s a bit of what I witnessed:
Photos by Lois Stavsky
Despite Washington DC’s zero tolerance policy, its public spaces continue to boast a range of “illegal” works from stickers and paste-ups to out-of-the-way graff pieces. On my recent visit, DC’s prolific sticker artist iwillnot gave me a tour of some works – all done, as he explained, “without permission.” Here is a sampling:
Photos by Lois Stavsky
When I started to hunt Montreal illegal street art, it appeared to me that a city is not static as usual people can think it. When you look closer, you can observe the walls change by the art that sticks on them. I was able to see the evolution of the streets and in the same time I saw ordinary places becoming amazing spots. When an artist, or a group of artists take over a wall, a door, and make it themselves, they give a soul to the city. Below you will see the transformation of some pieces whether completed or fixed. Interestingly, from a collective action or an individual one, it results that the urban environment is likely to be changed and magnified. The walls are for everyone but some of them exclusively belong to some artists. Hope they stay like this!
Photos by Aline Mairet
Until I was looking through Carnage NYC‘s photos, it never really dawn on my just how much variety You Go Girl has in their work. You Go Girl is one of those rare artists somewhere between a street artist and a graffiti writer who really has no boundaries for how they get up. It could be stickers, rollers, posters, spraypaint… It could be a character, tag, a throw-up… You Go Girl doesn’t fit comfortably any boxes. That sets them apart from a lot of street artists and graffiti writers who seem to find one thing and stick to doing that well until they get recognition for it (and then they keep going but at least by that point they might be getting paid).
Here’s just a small sampling of the different styles of work that You Go Girl produces on the street:
Photos by Carnage NYC
Although Bamn‘s works are often iconic pieces of the New York street art and graffiti landscape, he doesn’t seem to get too much attention online. We’ve only mentioned him twice, for his portraits of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning. There aren’t too many street artists making such prominent and political artwork. I think a lot of artists could take a cue from Bamn and use the streets to get the truth out there. Here are a few pieces he’s done, both recent and a bit older:
What am I missing? Because I don’t have much to add this week for the link-o-rama. It’s the middle of summer? Aren’t people getting up? Am I just not seeing it?
Photo by Alex Ellison
The difficulty with photographing sticker art or graffiti stickers is that it’s really difficult to provide context for the sticker without losing all the details that might make it interesting to begin with. This context versus context struggle exists when photographing just about any sort of street art or graffiti, but it’s especially true with stickers. They are usually so small that you have to get inches away for a good photo, but then it’s hardly clear if the sticker is on a busy street or in a leafy suburb, surrounded by other interesting things or the lone bit of culture for an entire block. This is especially important with illegal work like stickers where an artist is taking a risk to put something in a particular location of their choice (okay admittedly stickers are not all that risky). Understanding the context of the piece can really add to my appreciation for it. I don’t know if I’ve the first person or the thousandth to figure this out and I don’t consider myself a serious photographer, but I think I’ve stumbling across an interesting way to take photos of stickers that balances context and content: Panorama mode.
My iPhone has a panorama mode that I don’t think I’d ever used until earlier this summer, when I accidentally realized it could be useful for photographing stickers. I was just fooling around with my iPhone, seeing if the panorama mode could work if you had something up very close and also something far away that both needed to be in focus. So I tested it by photographing a sticker and trying to move from the sticker to some background elements across the street. I saw the resulting image and suddenly I hardly cared about my little experiment. I saw a photograph that captured the details of a sticker while still giving context to its placement, and I fell instantly in love with the technique.
Obviously taking photos with a wide angle lens or in panorama mode is nothing new, but I can’t remember ever having seen it used for this purpose before. If anyone wants to prove me wrong, please leave a comment. I’d love to see what other people have been doing with this technique.
What do you think of this technique? Does it is balance content and context well enough? These are just some early shots by me, and I’m no photographer, so if you think you can take this further and do it better, please do and let me know how it goes. I would love to see others improve upon this. For me, it’s made documenting stickers so much more fun and fulfilling. Anyone can photograph another printed André the Giant sticker, but this technique highlights how context can make even printed stickers unique so long as the placement is interesting.
Continue reading “Photographing stickers without losing context”
Although I’ve hardly written about Enzo and Nio on Vandalog before, I’ve been a big fan of their work for a while now. They work together to put up some great street art, mostly around NYC and other East Coast cities and in the form of wheatpastes and stickers. Their work is clever and fun, but also a bit controversial at times, which might explain why I haven’t known them to do any outdoor work with permission. There aren’t many street artists left in New York City with their talents who haven’t transitioned into doing primarily legal work, so I have to hand it to Enzo and Nio for keeping their work to street art’s roots of illegal free expression and surprise. Also, while so many street artists quickly fall into a pattern with one or two trademark styles that they unwaveringly stick to, Enzo and Nio put out a visually diverse range of street art. They have some images or phrases that repeat and some works that are part of a series, but it’s not just one series and one series often doesn’t look anything like the next. They’ve even ventured into gif art (and yes, the model in that piece is my girlfriend and Vandalog contributor Caroline Caldwell).
I’ve somehow neglected to post enough about Enzo and Nio, but I hope I can change that starting today. Enzo and Nio are a real pair of street artists, not just artists using the the street.
Photos by Hrag Vartanian, Rhiannon Platt, Erika Sequeira, Jason Eppink, SMKjr and Amolho4
