Remembering a Time When New York City’s Subways Were Covered in Graffiti

Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant have established a position as a graffiti photographer. Cooper was a photographer when I met a young photographer in the New York Daily News and graffiti. "These artists are often called writers." "He showed me how he designed his name to put it on the wall, and I had a culture behind it "Their classic" Metro Art "was first published in 1984 and will be released by Thames & Hudson this third month.

Chalfant is a sculptor who noticed graffiti on New York train and began shooting them. Cooper is interested in grabbing graffiti on the train and capturing the environment in New York City, and Chalfant is perfect for the two because it creates images very similar to that art.

As a photographer, Cooper and Chalfant have powerful negotiation tools and pictures that can immediately gain the author's trust. Many artists and writers use images to record their art. Mr. Cooper says that they spend most of their time with cheap cameras, and since they are not trained photographers, the images are not very good.

"I am coming, I can make them shoot better shots," she said. "As long as they can not take pictures, many of them do not draw pictures on the train, which is proof."

As they know to take pictures of their work, the writer leaves a message on Cooper and Chalfant's answering machine and tells you when to leave and where you can find art next to the train .

"There is a morning and an afternoon as there is no train with backlights," Cooper said. "There are things in our cars that we shot were not a lucky accident.

Regarding the ongoing concern for this book, Chalfant stated that part of it is in hunger and must see the era when New York was often romanticized but was sinned in the 1970s and 1980s Hmm.

"I do not know if it is nostalgic, but people want to know the origin of things, beyond art, beyond graffiti," he said. "It is very interesting to see the New York era, I like the pictures of that era, because of that alone, they show completely different times and will no longer occur ... Now it's a big market, When creative people improvise and put together what they have, the style is yours to go to the store to buy, I think it's cool. "

This book is legendary in the field of graffiti and street art. The desire for the first publication contributed to some interesting records of the publishing industry

"I am very proud that it is the most stolen book of course in the UK, probably in other countries, of course," Chalfant said. "Spray can art (a 1987 book on New York's graffiti), published by the London Times in the late 1980s, was the second most stolen book after Metro Art, ranking first and second It was attached.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the New York City subway was at the bottom of history. The number of passengers in the subway fell to the level of 1910, graffiti and criminal acts of the subway were rampant; in general, the maintenance of the subway was very bad, the problems of delay and pursuit were common. Nonetheless, NYCTA succeeded in opening six new subway stations in the 1980s, ordered the current subway fleet free and ordered 1,775 new subway cars. Until the early 1990s, the unprocessed outstanding balance accumulated over the past 20 years has not yet been confirmed today, but the situation has improved greatly.

There is no clear example of graffiti ability to corrode the public space than the fall and regeneration of the New York subway. Beginning in the late 1960s, intentional destruction of graffiti hit the New York transportation system. And a large-scale mural painting known as "tag" (nickname of destructive craftsman) and "fragment" of each subway. Mayor John Lindsey, the obvious champion of the urban poor, dislikes passion for graffiti, but he can not stop cancer. The city was unable to control graffiti, and it showed that the mob won. Passengers ran away from the subway and continued to move out of the city. For the country, the impact of graffiti shows a fall to New York's seemingly irreversible disorder

New York City in the 1970s and 1980s was very different from today's cities. The cars, logos and clothing style are not just time capsules of the times, but the city looks different: it is covered with graffiti. To think about it, please see the 1983 film "Wild Style". The eye-catching appearance on the day was tagged by artists such as the subway, building walls, Dondi, Seen, Lady Pink, Zephyr, Revolt, and graffiti spread to New York City. Many people merely saw and ignored this new art form, but the staff photographer Martha Cooper of the New York Post was interested in learning more about these graffiti and their authors.