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San Francisco Graffiti

41 pointsby walztoday at 10:02 AM31 commentsview on HN

Comments

jasonkestertoday at 11:26 AM

I live near Paris, and it's a shame to see this sort of thing on every surface here. It's so easy and effortless to trash the look of a place, and so much effort and pain to get it back to a presentable state. It just seems hopeless trying to stop it.

Sure, you can point to examples of graffiti that don't look all that bad, and I imagine some examples can even be considered to improve the look of a space. But taking this site as a random sample, the "good" ones are a vanishing minority. For every subtle Invader mosaic high on a building, you get dozens of effortless name tags that just wreck the look of a place.

Adding frustration is the fact that there's no way to effectively dissuade people from doing this. You don't want to fine, jail or otherwise ruin the lives of thousands of kids to get them to stop. You just want them to stop spraypainting shit. It's really the only example I can think of where I'd support some form of corporal punishment. Catch kids in the act, 20 lashes in the town square to convince them not to do it again, then set them to work with a wire brush until they can demonstrate that it's back to the state they found it. Even still, I can't imagine it would really do much to dissuade.

It's a shame.

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greeniskooltoday at 12:12 PM

Having a bit of a cultural shock at how English doesn't have a separate name for the "cruder" graffiti (such as tags) vs the more socially accepted street art. The former is typically called "pichação" [1] in Portuguese, and I was taught this distinction when learning about modern art movements back in elementary school.

[1] https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picha%C3%A7%C3%A3o - I recommend looking into a machine translated version of the Portuguese Wikipedia article, as the English Wikipedia article reads far more biased

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rib3yetoday at 1:16 PM

I’m the early 2000s I worked as an assistant producer on a San Francisco graffiti documentary featuring several of these artists

https://youtu.be/7Ub8uRFzUCQ

mergytoday at 1:22 PM

Lasercats that was briefly on the old theatre on Divisadero remains a favorite. This was like 15 years ago.

https://mergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/xndqw-full.jpg

walthamstowtoday at 12:59 PM

As an aside, the Financial Times (yes, that one) did a great interview a couple of years ago with prolific London graff artist 10FOOT.

The comments were predictably howling with rage and injustice ("he's a criminal!!", says employee of cartel laundry HSBC), but I enjoyed it a lot.

https://www.ft.com/content/45a184ee-b7d9-4c16-b1c2-71def32cc...

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InMicetoday at 11:43 AM

Cool, but why lay out the images in such an annoying way? Whatever happened to simple, functional photo galleries? I miss them.

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themarktoday at 1:23 PM

I scrolled pretty far and didnt see Borf in there. Was that Web 2.0 ?

s_devtoday at 11:18 AM

Fascinating, I do love street art and tastefully done graffiti. Some of it is obnoxious. I think it does add to the character of a city e.g. New York, Berlin, Montreal, Paris all have some amazing work etc.

I submit Irish Graffiti I see here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Graifiti/

Though I think displaying these things as a map is more useful: https://streetartcities.com/cities/sanfrancisco

There is a an Irish artist called Dan Leo and I have bought lots of his prints. https://www.danleodesign.com/ so they are dotted around my office and home.

I think they're great! He does animals and I love the style, clean lines and bright colours, they remind me of US football team logos.

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ghuroo1today at 11:07 AM

I like the concept, wish it was a vertical scroll with some safe margins between each picture (also to give them more stage time and removing the noise/distraction from many pictures stitched together)

defrosttoday at 11:02 AM

As a suggestion,

* Orientation - some images are sideways,

* Option to walk through by date order, and by location ...

There is an audience for the time ordered flux of images on particular sites (at least in Australia).

mvellanditoday at 12:23 PM

This collection is a bit ordinary and unremarkable. There are many great large format, new/used print books on street art

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threethirtytwotoday at 1:16 PM

Beautiful and disgusting at the same time.

It’s vandalizing public property in the same way that human shit vandalizes a lot of public property in SF. I don’t know which one is worse. One can be beautiful, the other is done because he has no choice.

For graffiti I’m in support of lashing or whipping the people that do this. It’s effective in Singapore. But then we lose all this great public art.

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JKCalhountoday at 12:20 PM

Some of these are great.

I expect the mundane "wildstyle" tagging on train cars but have been surprised a few times to see trains roll through town with much more complex graffiti. I'm happy to see examples of some of that more artful work in this post.

If you've seen the film, "Brother From Another Planet" you might look at graffiti a little differently as I do. :-)

wummstoday at 10:41 AM

Would have looked further, but scroll wheel finger cramped. Keyboard nav would be great.

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metalmantoday at 11:41 AM

If graffiti changed anything it would be illegal.

It's ok

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fleroviumnatoday at 11:24 AM

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