STREET ART AS A PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT

One of my current photo-projects is about Street Art. As you might have already read in the “Who I am” section of this blog (right column), during my life I have been a professional historian and I am a passionate photographer. So, I believe in the documentary value of photography. This is especially important in relation with Street Art, because many masterpieces painted on the walls along the streets last only a few years. Most of these works disappear over time or become very degraded and almost unrecognizable. Sometimes, the very building where the masterpiece is painted might be destroyed for several reasons. A meaningful example is the famous mural Wall of Respect (see the image, unknown photographer) painted in Chicago in 1967 and destroyed in 1971 to make way for urban renewal. Even if this is a poor image, it has great value from a documentary point of view. Photography may help to perpetuate these works forever.

I became aware for the first time of the existence of Street Art as a recognized artistic project in Italy, when, in 2008, I visited the Campidoglio neighborhood in the northern city of Turin. Of course, these kind of projects started long before, mostly in the United States and Canada, but at the time I did not know much about them.

In Turin, I started composing images of those wonderful pieces of art, some of them real masterpieces. Very soon I began to wonder about the true meaning of this kind of photography. Preservation, as I said before, was an important goal, but I was not satisfied with simply reproducing the artists’ work. As a photographer, I was concerned about adding something to the artists’ paints. How could I convert a set of images on the subject of street art into a real photographic project?

As a historian, I know the importance of context. To correctly understand an event, we must place it in its historical, cultural and/or anthropological context. An artistic event is not different from the others. For this reason, the photographer’s task is not simply about showing a work, but about visually explaining where the author has done this work and why. This is, of course, a much more challenging goal than reproducing and preserving, but it turns my work as a photographer and historian into something much more interesting and exciting. It implies researching and a lot of watching.

This is a first example of what I mean by that. This mural was created in Washington DC by artist Rose Jaffe in May 2016. It was painted on the wall of a homeless shelter, between 1^st and 2^nd St. NW, next to the Mitch Snyder Art & Education Center for the Homeless, within walking distance of the US Capitol and the Third Street Tunnel. For this reason, this image shows a federal employee walking in front of the mural, which do not have any relationship with the homeless shelter.

And here we have another important point about street art in photography. Composing pictures of different murals, I realized that is almost impossible to properly illustrate these artworks with a single image. A good work about this topic must show as much aspects as possible of a mural work: artistic and esthetic features, of course, but also the most meaningful details and the urban environment. This way of proceeding helps to communicate a key element of street art: the artist’s message, which, no matter if you share or not his/her vision, is inseparable from the work of art itself.

In the next post I will show more pictures and more information about this mural.