Sound Focus Blography

I saw this on a wall somewhere near the River in Brooklyn, NYC.  This was the first "clay" graffiti I had seen in my trips up to NYC or even in my backyard of Washington DC.  This one struck me as interesting because of the vibrant colors and of the subtle '3D" effect the clay on the wall had.  This was a rare find in a sea of wheat posters and post office stickies and serves as a warning to us.

We have an impact on this planet.  To turn a blind eye to that fact is blatant ignorance.  Can we not at some point stop all the bickering and back-and-forth name calling and finger pointing and simply just talk about what the future will hold if changes are not put into action?  We are talking about our kids and our kids, kids future and so on.  I'm not saying we have to solve all the problems today or tomorrow, but we need to be able to sit down and have a rational discussion about it.  After all, if we can't discuss anything rationally with each other... what is left for us?

"Function-less art is simply tolerated vandalism."

I read that sentence once on the back of an LP by "Type O Negative."  I never really gave those words much thought until, many years later, I had seen the after affects of the "whitewashing" of the famous "5 Pointz" site.  Is graffiti "function-less art?"  Does it serve no purpose?  Is it vandalism to be removed with ladders and white paint in the middle of the night under police protection?  If something means so much to a group of people that you have you sneak in during the dead of night with an escort of armed police men to protect you, then I think the message is loud and clear.  5 Points was important to lots of people from all around the world.  5 points was not function-less art.

I visited 5 points 2 weeks to it's "whitewashing" and saw artists of all types coming together to leave their own unique mark on the site.  I saw people with pads and paper sketching the block and building.  Older guys with 4x9 field cameras, another with a time lapse setup hoping to catch the sunset as it faded over the site across the river to the west.  When you have so much creativity going on at one place, it's hard to imagine what was going through the minds of Jerry Wolkoff and his associates when they decided that they had had enough, and decided to end it all in the middle of that fateful night.

There was something special at 5 points.  It's gone now.  Sure, you can still see the building.  It's still there.  You can even see hints of it's former glory peeking out behind the drab panels of 'white" that now cover the facade of the building which sort of mock the passer by with sort of a "damn! look what you missed" sort of feeling.

5 points will live on, but only in photos and stories.  To quote another phrase from the back of another album I saw once... "Moving on is a simple thing.  What it leaves behind is hard."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Pointz https://www.flickr.com/photos/aslimak/sets/72157637249823614

Why shoot street art?  That is a question people tend to ask me from time to time.  And I ask myself that same question sometimes.  For me… street art represents a small moment in time that most often goes un-noticed.  It’s the image a small boy in a jacket on a wall next to a pile a trash that wasn’t there the day before that catches your eye as you walk to the subway like you’ve done a million times before.  It’s the feeling you get when you look for that same image on your way home and discover that it has been painted over or erased.  You think might think to yourself… “Did I really see that small child in the jacket next to the trash earlier?”  It’s the image of a small yellow rat smirking at you from the top of a 5th story brownstone as you happen to glance up at the sky.  You do a double take to see if it is still there.  And in that moment, you get a feeling that maybe there is someone/something else in the city along with you.

The city is such a dynamic and chaotic environment.  Things change at a pace that seems far beyond our grasp.  Street art brings a hint at trying to rationalize the strangeness and sometimes too often hardships of living in an ever changing environment.  It’s us leaving a small reminder to the city… “we were here.”  ”Our mark might be gone in 15 minutes, but it was here.  And if it’s erased, it will return.”

My shots are attempt to showcase and preserve the work that the artists have created.  It maybe gone in 10 minutes.  It maybe defaced or altered.

From time to time I venture into various cities to photograph urban art and the gritty decay that seem to only be found in large urban settings.

This is a well known street mural in the Chelsea section of Manhattan done by Eduardo Kobra.  Located on the corner of a non-descriptive street lined with auto sound and repair shops, various residential buildings and seemingly "vacant on a weekend" type of hi-rise structures.  This is a very impressive piece.  The scale is huge... 4 stories tall!!  The colors are vibrant and takes the viewer back to a simpler time.