I tend to go on about a presence on the street and in our communities by means of the paper, leaflet, sticker and poster. However there is another method of keeping you message on the street, and it doesn't cost a printer, ink cartridges and paper. I am of course talking about graffiti. It seems, like the paper on the street, to have gone out of fashion. Done in the right places it can last much longer than the paper, though it doesn't find its way into people's houses, but it can make its way into their minds. For some of us, a wee walk down memory lane.
Long before the days of social media and online petitions graffiti
has been used as an expressive display against the corporate and
political powers that be. When I say graffiti, I don’t mean the multi-coloured three
dimensional ‘tagging’ and artwork that you see aside canal towpaths and
scrapyards, I’m talking about early graffiti, hand written messages and
slogans written by anarchists and underdogs across the county.
I picked up a couple of books on this subject ‘The writing on the
wall’ by Roger Perry and ‘Graffiti’ by Richard Freeman. These books show
a number of early images of graffiti dating from the 1960s through to
the 1970s, a long time before the Bronx and subway inspired art reached
our shores. Amongst a number of nonsensical written messages and
slogans, there are pictures of graffiti which addresses racism,
capitalism, greed and inequality, all daubed across the walls and
bridges of our inner cities and suburbs.
These images got me intrigued and made me want to dig deeper and seek
out more images of this nature. A high number of the images I came
across were taken during the turbulent Thatcher years, where tensions
were high and the disenfranchised expressed their anger and feelings
towards the Tory government and authorities of the era.
There is something about the images below, a bold statement that
makes you think deeper about the message being put across and what
became of the people who wrote them.
