"It was a form of communication." — Dream

Though regional differences in graffiti had long been an aspect of the form even from its earliest days — think L.A. Chicano writing or Philly Handstyle — the popularity and influence of the 1983 movie WILD STYLE, as well as Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant's book SUBWAY ART, accelerated the process. When PBS ran the cult classic the following year, numerous young writers around the country took up spray cans and strove to find their voice — both as individuals and within local scenes. And so by the late 1980s, when this album was compiled, numerous graffiti vernaculars had developed — including the Bay Area's defining combination (recorded here) of increasingly abstracted letter work coupled with bright, decidedly West Coast colors. This reaction to traditional NYC "Wild Style" became known as "New Wave" and was an attempt to lend the dynamism and kineticism of subway cards to otherwise stationary walls.
This album, shot and assembled by an unidentified photographer, documents the works of many of Oakland's best known writers at the time, from Dream (an early Bay Area pioneer) to WCU, Lazy, Sugar Spice, Mr. DRM, Vogue (and other TDK crew pieces), Phresh, and 247 Spyz. Over more than 170 color snapshot images (including numerous hand-assembled panoramas), not only are large finished pieces carefully recorded, but more unusually (given essentially the crimes they're documenting) in several cases so are the (unnamed) artists themselves (some even holding paint cans).
With a point-of-view that is rather more intimate than anthropological, we suspect the photographer to likely be a crew member or fellow writer — though any conclusive identification remains tantalizingly difficult. Two slips of paper laid in are signed by a Russell Clark under various aliases, and several photos show people in the foreground, one of whom could easily be the photographer. But the only other identifiers are a clipped article about one Anthony Santos (a painter for Oakland's Graffiti Removal Inspection Program) and another label underneath two photos identifying a piece as being from Atlanta — though it appears to be the only non-Bay Area location in the collection.
While there are a handful of images of likely commissioned murals and some probable permission walls, the vast majority of these images are taken in and around train yards, abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and other urban landscapes. As one of the most ephemeral (and illicit) of genres, any primary documentation of graffiti is not only rare, but important. A collection assembled with obvious care over several years (dated stamps to versos suggest ca. 1987-1989), a significant record of a burgeoning regional incarnation of a quintessentially American art form.