Back to the camera today. I am noticing what I am noticing. This is a process of writing, of all art making, but in photographs it is some how more deeply felt. What is it about the graffiti, the stickers, the posters and signs that make up the clothing of the street that appeals to me so? Why do I have photo after photo of spray paint skulls, flame decals, stencils of famous faces, cartoon characters, defaced posters? What is legible, what can I read in these things?
Down here, at the micro-level, these ways of marking public space, unintended and usually unwanted by property owners, city planners, and even some average citizens, are visual clutter. They crowd an already overstimulating scene, the city street full of people, with visual language. This may be the draw for me. As a 21st century writer, hasn’t it all been said? Isn’t it all being said at the same time as me? Yet I keep producing verbiage, hoping to catch your eye on this website, with a twist of phrase, I keep hoping that you’re reading this.
What is easier, pontification or self-reflection? Opening the third eye to the world or to the interior? Should I meditate on what these photos mean, or just what they mean to me? Does any photo mean anything except, “here is light, extracted, sliced, presented?” Light has drawn this meaning on these chemicals or in these pixels. Shouldn’t that be enough? But it never is, of course. We seek the caption, the artist’s statement, the context. We want a narrative. So image making gives way to story telling, or writing. The cave-wall painting must have flickered and moved in the dim light of the fire, and this would have all been accompanied by a song of the shaman-artist. So I’ll explain the pictures.
I’m an alien to the city in some ways. Not just this city, but The City, the Urban, the bustling world. A born and raised suburbanite, the streets I haunted as a youth are all verdant and sparsely populated, though lined with orderly houses, each with its own disaffected teenager inside, thinking he was all alone. We had graffiti in New Rochelle, even outside of the more dense downtown, but it reeked of adolescent dissatisfaction–or of more urbane taggers from nearby New York City. New Rich Hell, we called it as teenagers. Everything that smacked of rebellion smacked of aimless rebellion, a soup of malaise and a general grudging obligation TO rebel, American teenagers that we were. We didn’t know what we wanted to happen, but something, anything cooler than the landscape we were in.
Once I moved into the city–my carapace hardened, ironically, by my failure to live rurally, having attempted to be a farm hand and just spending more and more time on my parents’ couch, or taking train rides into New York to see friends–I paid more and more attention to graffiti, its contours and florescence. I also paid attention to the way its talked about. For the broken-window theory of policing, graffiti is fungal, it grows on dead tissue to show the death. The proliferation of graffiti in the city was marked as urban decay. But who had the city decayed for and for whom was it a vibrant underbrush?
That was there. Now I am here. Mexico of course has an internationally very famous history of art on walls from the movimiento del Muralismo, but that’s not what I want to notice myself noticing by taking pictures of the street art here. I want to say that I’m noticing the mood of the city, that old saw that the city wears its feelings in its graffiti. (Where did I get that? Terry Pratchett, I think.) I don’t know if that’s true. But oh what if I am documenting something as immense as the way Mexico City feels? Wouldn’t that be something?
But I doubt it. What would that even mean? How would these pictures, so dimly lit, as the rainy season shaded my efforts, imply or translate the feeling on the streets, as government employees were shot, or as the streets fill with anger at Neo-colonialism and rent hikes, or as my son’s Spanish grows and the rains fall and fall? Best to leave the mood of the city to the photo journalists and try for beauty.
Beauty. What is it I find so beautiful about these photos? I could be harder on myself and my burgeoning hobby, and say I don’t find them beautiful, I find them at best, a good start. But I do find them beautiful. I like the light, the way it dances or sinks. The stickers and drawings and signs make me laugh. The colors awe me. I need these photos, to keep me noticing. Noticing what? The way the light moves down the street and strikes someone else’s art.
Mordecai Martin, Writer 