Graffiti Culture

An academic look at the graffiti movement in New York City, with some photos by Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfont, and others.

New York City is where the quintessential contemporary people’s art of graffiti was born. The top "writers" go "all city" when their tags can be seen throughout the five boroughs. This exhilarating selection of their work, assembled by Hugo Martinez, a leading authority on the history of street art in NYC, takes the reader on an "all-city" tour of New York, displaying the extraordinary range of its taggers and bombers. More than two hundred photographs showcase the artwork of the most prominent names of the past five years, including CASE 2, KEZ, MÖSCO, SKUF, VFR, and MQ. As graffiti comes to be embraced as a medium in its own right, its most important practitioners in NYC confirm the power and creativity of this vital contemporary language.

Subway purists may be turned off by this book, filled with photographs of NYC's finest rolling stock covered with grafitti. Some of it is rather artistic, but fortunately the days of the spraypainted stainless steel rolling canvas are long gone. Cooper and Chalfant also collaborated on a video entitled Style Wars, from which came many of the photos in this book.