From the margins

Since its inception, photographic art has paid special attention to cities and large urban centres. The first generation of photographers in history, those who began to experiment with the new possibilities of capturing and developing images, turned their gaze to the large cities that were rapidly transforming and reconfiguring themselves with the advance of the 19th century and the arrival of the 20th century, at the height of modernity. That great visual production consolidated the development of a new language, what we might today identify as the photographic urban landscape.

That photographic urban landscape is articulated through a myriad of fields that interact with the city in an organic way, such as architecture, sociology, urban planning, politics, transport, and even more artistic areas such as fashion, music and the arts. The city is, therefore, a breeding ground, a space for experimentation from which an infinite number of links, relationships, and social and creative acts are generated. And it is in this counterpoint that an extremely close relationship arises between the photographic urban landscape and one of the cultural manifestations most deeply rooted in the city: graffiti.

In 1974, the American essayist, journalist and filmmaker Norman Mailer wrote an emblematic text entitled “The Faith of Graffiti”, which, for many, marks the birth of graffiti as an art form. Mailer's biographer, J. Michael Lennon, cites two reasons why Mailer admired graffiti artists: graffiti is an act of transgression against social norms, and graffiti artists are courageous in facing the possible legal consequences, such as beatings or imprisonment. Public art critic Enrico Conadio considers “The Faith of Graffiti” to be the first “epistemological legitimisation” of graffiti art, as it examines graffiti critically and intellectually, rather than simply considering it an urban phenomenon. The essay also connects graffiti with non-American cultural roots to “renew American imaginative life” and establishes a connection with the beginnings of art and its roots in the human psyche.

It is no coincidence that the 1970s also saw the emergence of the work of Jon Naar, a British photographer who tirelessly photographed graffiti and urban art in the United Kingdom and the United States, mainly in New York City, which, along with Philadelphia, is considered by many to be the birthplace of graffiti. Naar used his images to recognise and highlight graffiti as a modern and distinct subculture in a conflictive and changing city, and its protagonists as marginalised young people. In this context, the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat also emerged. Towards the end of the 1970s, he established himself as the first great graffiti artist, which led the most renowned art galleries and museums to view graffiti and street art as an artistic movement to be taken seriously.

In this line of appreciation of urban photographic imagery oriented towards graffiti and urban art, the work of Nicolas Lerner emerges. Through an almost obsessive search for graffiti over the course of twenty years in cities such as Lima, Bogotá, Medellín, Miami, Berlin, Paris, and Madrid, among others, the tireless Lerner travels to major cities in search of images and texts that act as devices that reconfigure the city. Because, just as architecture and urban planning intentionally redesign the urban landscape, graffiti and street art do their part, but from their own trench. Whether they are political messages or social protests, humour, still lifes, or more aesthetic expressions linked to architecture or the urban landscape, Nicolás Lerner's work is a visual document that explores society in articulation with the city with reference to urban practices that originate in open public space. It is an exercise in visual anthropology delimited by territory, focusing on an urban expression conceived mainly in the most marginalised neighbourhoods, whose exponents seek their own channel of expression and communication. Graffiti is more than an art form, it is a revolution, a sub culture, which, due to its ephemeral nature, demands, more than any other artistic expression, a photographic record, a testimony, a form of documentation. In this sense, these two forms of expression that have always been on the margins of the artistic canon: photography and graffiti, complement each other, need each other, feed off each other. The permanence of graffiti and urban art is materialised through the language of photography. Without photography, graffiti would be destined to disappear.

Just as a novel captivates its reader, music thrills its listener, or theatre touches the soul of its audience, graffiti—from a more democratic and free, almost marginal place—is there to catch the eye of a distracted passer-by, a stressed driver, or a patient passenger and penetrate their minds with a powerful message. To move, to reflect, to think. Graffiti is there to take us out of our comfort zone. In Lerner's case, graffiti seduces his camera lens to expand, document, and perpetuate the message.

Carlos Caamaño A.

References 

(1974). Norman Mailer. The Faith of Graffiti. New York: Praeger Publishers.

(2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon and Schuster

(2019). Enrico Bonadio. The Cambridge Handbook of Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press