GRAFFITTI PARIS BOOK

Paris wanderer,

Look around and take notice of the traces left by street artists on the city's walls and pavement. Rethink the city, rediscover its surfaces, and map out walks that may lead you to new graphic horizons. Cross the street if you must, step a little closer, and spot everything in the City of Lights that has been painted or pasted just for you. Keep your eyes open and keep walking-maybe there will be something else to see way down at the other end of the street.

Find something in the least imaginable places, choose what to look at— beauty is where you discover it-and interpret the artistic messages that are being communicated to you.

This is an adventure that takes place in the street. Like many other areas of urban culture, for example street fashion, street art has its own visual codes.

The word "graffiti" refers to inscriptions and drawings made on walls, which also encompasses those controversial spray-painted tags-authentic claims to a graffiti writer's identity-that began to proliferate throughout Paris beginning in the mid-1980s. These signatures were inspired by the lettering styles developed by early American graffiti writers, the pioneers of the modern graffiti movement in the 1970s. This aspect of graffiti has had a bad reputation, for it is the writer's goal to place his or her signature in as many places as possible, often in blatant disregard of property. This is also the form of graffiti writing most visible and, to the critic, the least attractive. Yet over the past twenty years, artists have evolved the graffiti genre by creating new signs, pic-tures, and logos to distinguish themselves from previous generations, and to rise out of the current crowd. These new forms of pictorial writing have resulted in what one may view as a "post-graffiti" movement, which is revolutionizing urban inscriptions with new graphic elements and also transforming calligraphies and signatures into recognizable urban culture icons.

For more than fifteen years, my father and I went to the places where we knew we'd find these inscriptions and we photographed them. We wandered through the city enjoying the hunt.