New wall: Florida

Shown here: florida/east 8, January 15, 2006. Pieces by Curve, Does(?), Pastime and Erupto.

Tonight instead of watching the fireworks I made good on a promise… I said I’d update the site, so here’s an update. Flickr user Irieposse uploaded some classic pieces from the 1990’s to our group pool. Those pieces were painted on a wall that is, amazingly, still running today. I’ve been shooting this same wall since 2002, so between the two of us, our photos span 15 years of history. You can really see how styles have changed. Featuring work by Amaze, Some, Hast, MSA, Deen, Dug, Curve, Diet, Igni, Obces, Pest, Ceat, Does, Pastime, Erupto, Eklips, Reyes, Hense, Sever, Steel, Norm, Amanda Lynn, Eyeko, Bles, and a few others I can’t ID.

Many thanks to Irieposse for opening up that shoebox!

New layers: cove

Shown here: cove/eastZ layer 34, February 19, 2006. Pieces by Katz and Dest.

I’ve added nine new layers to the “cove” wall, featuring pieces by Aera, Ashes, Dest, Drsk, Flows, Ghana, Grail, Jas7, Katz, Rome, Siez, Skan, Swef, Zel, and a few others whose names are beyond my ken. If you look closely you might also catch a Mear One tag in there. Running 34 layers deep, this is now by far the thickest wall in my archives.

New layers: belmont

Photo by Scott Garner.

Jonathan Tobin recently created a Flickr group for photos of the Belmont Art Park in Los Angeles. Scott Garner added some photos he took during a film shoot he was working on (one of many that used to happen at that location). I thought it’d be fun to show a little before-and-after on one of his photos. Above is the original photo, and below is how it appears in grafarc. The perspective warp, which was necessary to make the front of the building line up with the other layers, ends up distorting the people and equipment quite a lot.

Shown here: belmont/building layer 4, April 25 2004. Photo by Scott Garner.

I’ve also added another of Scott’s photos from the same date to the belmont/tunnel area.

New layers: bluxome

Shown here: bluxome/eastC layer 7, March 2001. Photos by Peter Merridew. Artists, from left to right: QUAKE, CODEAK, APEX.

Going through my archives of photos scraped from the web, I stumbled upon some missing layers from the Bluxome alley. Appearing under “bluxome/eastB” and “bluxome/eastC” are five new layers of photos, courtesy of Peter Merridew, Susan Farrell, and Maseo on Art Crimes (the web’s original graffiti site, an amazing resource in case you didn’t already know about it). The new layers fill in some gaps in the period from 2000-2001 (during which I didn’t take nearly enough pictures) and feature work by BLIS, GIANT, APEX, NEON, CODEAK, SHIME, QUAKE, ZORE, and others.

This brings the site’s total count to 217 layers, distributed among 22 walls from 10 locations. This is still only a small fraction of what I have to share. I’ll do my best to keep updating the site with new material as time allows!

New wall: bluxome/eastB

Finally, at long last, the middle of the east wall on Bluxome alley is ready! I had the left and right ends of the wall finished a while ago, but this center section has seen a lot of action over the past seven years, and it took some time to put it all together. Hopefully it was worth the wait: this section features not one but six different pieces by APEX, as well as work by ATOM, IVORY, BLIS, ZORE, SEAK, DAIM, MARS-1, PICASSO, PERSUE, QUAKE, AEROE, SPOZE, POSH, and others. That’s fourteen layers of mind candy for your screen-sore eyes.

Watch this space for more updates… now that this wall is done, I can start going through my hundreds of photos from the other wall.

New layer: 19th Street

I actually added this layer a couple of weeks ago, but wasn’t able to post the update because the server hacking incident knocked out our ability to edit the blog until just now. Shown here are three new pieces by Apex, Neon, and Jase, plus some amazing characters by Chor Boogie from San Diego.

new location: ghost

Keeping up with the fast pace of the San Francisco scene is not easy! Today’s new spot, aka ghost/house, is what you might call a “dirty” wall. This is not your typical permission wall or hall of fame for the bright and shiny, it’s just the gritty reality of graf in the raw. In the past year, it’s been a tagging scratchpad, a practice wall for toys, a windowbox for wild fennel plants, and a picture frame for full-color pieces. I’ve added 11 layers so far, featuring work by Orfn, Zeros, Aydo, Seko, Twick, Aim, Aren, and Unity, among many others. No doubt there will be more to come…

new layers: cove

Just added five new layers to the “cove” wall, featuring new pieces by Zel, Drsk, Skew, Buter, Riel, Cake87, Jime, and many more. Most of these pieces are already gone in the real world, of course, but their ghosts are preserved here for your enjoyment.

new location: cove

After just six months of shooting pictures and trawling the web, I’ve gathered enough layers to do a thorough treatment of one of my current favorite San Francisco spots, which I’ll call cove. Many thanks to Claudine and Del for contributing their bright, shiny photos!

This is just one of several walls. Look for more from this spot in the coming months…

Flickr badges

Our Flickr group keeps growing, and its members (all 249 of them) are continuing to submit interesting photos from all over the world. The fine folks at Flickr have provided some very handy new tools, such as a photo “badge” that shows the most recent photos added to the pool. I’ve added one to the sidebar of this blog, so you can easily check what’s new.

If you have digital photos you’d like to submit to Graffiti Archaeology, it’s pretty easy: get yourself a free Flickr account, upload your photos, and add them to the Graffiti Archaeology group. If you’re old school and only shoot on film, don’t let that stop you. We’d be happy to scan your classic flicks. Just drop us a line (info “at” grafarc “dot” org) and we’ll set things up.