Muammar al-Gaddafi (1949 – )
In power in Libya since a 1969 coup, Gaddafi held no office or title. He is known as ‘Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’ or ‘Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution’. Gaddafi invented a system called Islamic Socialism, and wrote a three volume with his political philosophy, called the ‘ Green Book’. Didn’t like opposition and send Libyan hit squads abroad to kill dissidents.

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Idi Amin Dada (mid-1920s – 2003)
Succeeded to give even dictators a bad name. The number of people killed as a result of his regime is unknown, estimates range from 80.000 to 500.000. His mental state was reflected in the title he gave himself: ‘His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beast of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and the Conquerer of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular’.

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Mobutu Sese Seko (1930 – 1997)
Was president of Zaire from the mid sixties till 1997. He liked public executions, often organized as open-air spectacles. Mobutu created a personality cult around himself. The evening news on television was preceded by an image of him descending through clouds from heaven. There was only one political party, The Popular Movement of Revolution, and its membership was obligatory for everyone in Zaire. Voting also, with Mobutu as sole candidate.

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Saddam Hussein (1937 – 2006)
Everyone knows this fellow. Even killed some husbands of his daughters because they were not loyal. He used chemical weapons against his own people, that caused thousands of deaths. Uncountable portraits, posters, statues, and murals were erected in his honor. Saddam Hussein was also famous for his doppelgängers. The real Saddam was dragged out of a hole in the ground and met at the end, rather chaotically, the gallows.

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Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976)

IF you managed to control every daily aspect of the lives of one fifth of the worlds population, you got to have charisma. Mao Zedong combined that with a huge ego and a crazy mind. His ideas, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, are blamed for costing millions of lives. For instance, he ordered that unproven and unscientific new agricultural techniques should be used. The result was that the grain production dropped and many millions starved to death in the largest famine in human history.

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Jean-Claude Duvalier (1951 – )

Better known as Baby Doc. Ruled Haiti in the seventies and eighties. When his father Francios Duvalier (Papa Doc) died, he became at the age of nineteen the world youngest president. Baby Doc left all the work for his mother, attended only ceremonial functions and lived as a playboy. Robbed the country for millions. While the people struggled for their livelihood, Duvaliers wedding costed an estimated 3 million dollars. When he left in 1986 to live in exile in France, Haiti was bankrupt.

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Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini (1902 – 1989)
When you think that God is on your side, it’s hard for other people to convince you that what you do is wrong. From 1979 till 1989 Khomeini was the 1st Supreme Leader of Iran. His government was was ‘a God’s government,’ and disobedience against it was a ‘revolt against God’. He gave Rushdie his fatwa. Women were forced to cover their hair, men were not allowed to wear shorts. Opposition to the religious rule met harsh punishments. Or as he said; ‘I shall kick their teeth in’.

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IT’S a rainy day in 1974 in New York. Saul Bass is walking on Fifth Avenue, somewhere around the 62nd street. With his hands in his trench coat, collar turned up, he’s thinking about the movie he’s directing. It’s almost finished; all it needs is a good poster.

Since it’s raining, he decides to visit the Metropolitan Museum. The movie is called Phase IV. He needs a powerful image for the poster. ‘What can I use’, he’s wondering while walking through the galleries of the museum, almost bumping into another visitor. Then he sees the statue ‘Ugolino and His Sons’ by the sculptor Jean-Baptist Carpeaux. That hand, wretched with agony… That, with ants crawling out off it!

Los Angeles, 1985. Jim Phillips is flipping through a row of movies at Blockbuster. His girlfriend is visiting her family, so he has the weekend for himself. He loves science fiction, contrary to his girlfriend. With her away, there is nothing that can stop him.

Well, perhaps that thing he has to do for Santa Cruz, a skateboard company. They want him to design a sticker. ‘Something radical’. Yeah right. Hmmm, what’s this? Phase IV. Never heard of it. Nice illustration. Wait a minute, what if I replace the ants with an opened mouth… I call it ‘Screaming Hand’! Eureka!

(Dramatization, may not have happened)

From left to right: a detail of ‘Ugolino and His Sons, by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, 1865-67 / Poster for Phase IV, by Saul Bass, 1974 / ‘Screaming Hand’, by Jim Phillips, 1985.

One of the nicest of the torn tees is a dirty, white one. The rips are in a vertical series in the belly of the shirt. Another one has the words ‘Terrorsquade, The United States Athletics Division’ printed on it. There a two big cuts on the shoulders. A blue T-shirt, with big sweat stains, has rips in the form of a half circle on the front. The cloth falls out, exposing the Asmat flesh.

Another example is the work ‘Jimi & Ndo’. Twenty separate photo’s show a day in the life of the Papua Ndo. He’s sitting in a boat, walks by the river, and chills in a white garden chair. What makes the photo special is the shirt Ndo is wearing. The front of the tee is completely covered with a portrait of Jimi Hendrix and with the gestures of Ndo, Jimi follows.

The torn tees of the Asmat

A detail of the work ‘Jimi & Ndo’

That was also the place where Jon Naar and Mervyn Kurlansky 1972 started their project. On the first day out they met a couple of kids at Harlem’s 155th station. These youngsters were writers and happy to show them around. For the next two years Butler 1, Blood 167, Junior 161 and Cay 161 acted as guides for Naar and Kurlansky.

The result was published in 1974. In the US the book was called ‘The Faith of Graffiti’ (Praeger Publishers), in the UK it had the name ‘Watching My Name Go By’ (Mathews Miller Dunbar). It was also published in France and the Netherlands. Famous novelist Norman Mailer wrote a sixteen-page introduction for the book.

The work pictured in the book is a variety between kids scribbling and tags of some of the pioneers of graffiti. There are a couple of photo’s of StayHigh 149 – yeah he’s the one with the Saint stick figure and the joint attached to the crosspiece of the letter H – and there is even a top-to-bottom train by him in the book. The young guides must be responsible for pointing out of the early masters like StayHigh 149. They are also in the book, immortalized in a classic photo. On a stairway of the subway you see Butler 1 and his buddy’s, holding up pieces of paper with their tags written on it.

The Faith of Graffiti / Watching My Name Go By is long out of print and old copies do more than 100 dollar. But with the recent appreciation of ‘the oldskool’, photographer Jon Naar realized that he had the first steps of modern graffiti locked up in his archive. In 2007 Birth of Graffiti (Prestel) was released, bringing the early seventies writers back to life.

Butler 1 and his buddy writers at Harlem’s 155th station in 1973.

In the ten years that follow graffiti keeps developing, but no significant publication is brought out. Until 1984. In that year the well-known publishing house Thames & Hudson presents Subway Art, a praiseful collection of painted subway cars in New York City. Three years later there is a follow up: Spraycan Art. This book handles graffiti in a much broader way. The pieces are on walls and other American city’s and even Europe and Australia are visited. Those two books influenced a generation of writers. Some even call it the ‘graffiti bible’.

Subway Art was made by photographers Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper. They both worked separately, searching the subway for ‘fresh burners’. In the course of taking these pictures, the photographers became friends with the graffiti writers. In fact, the writers introduced them to each other. Chalfant and Cooper met and joined forces. They completed each other because the different approach of working.

Henry Chalfant , at the time a sculptor, focused his attention on the paintings, isolating them from their environment. A subway car is twenty meters long and it cannot be captured broadside with a normal 50mm lens when standing on the platform. Chalfant couldn’t photograph in an angle, otherwise the details of the father end of the piece were not visible. But he found a way. Chalfant managed to take, with quick footwork, several pictures of one piece. He was not on the (above-ground) platform where the train arrived, but on the other one and so not bothered by passengers getting of. In the darkroom he shuffled the separated photos of one piece together.

Martha Cooper was a photojournalist and that was noticeable in her work. It was not just the pieces, but also its surroundings. She photographed the writers working the trains in the yards and took shots of the subway cars in their urban environment. She spent days on rooftops and abandoned buildings in the South Bronx, waiting for hours for a painted train to pass by.

The two together made a perfect team. The pictures of Chalfant were just an objective registration of the graffiti in New York in the late seventies, early eighties. Every detail of the pieces are visible and it gives a good look of the quality of the work that these anonymous artists made. Cooper put her photos in a time frame by adding the surroundings. You see the grime buildings of the projects in contrast with the colorful trains. And her portraits of the writers gave the artists a face

A fold out of a Chalfant picture from a piece by Dondi.

The book gave an introduction in graffiti. It began with a brief history of the art form. But it did also something far more important. Their contacts with the writers, those often tip them off when a new piece was sprayed, made it possible to document the graffiti slang. The vocabulary of the New York writers became, partly as a result of the book, the standard for the rest of the world. Terms like ’throw-up’ (a name painted quickly with one layer of paint and an outline) and ‘toy’ (inexperienced or incompetent writer) are still used today.

But not all the people of New York liked ‘the giant mobile comic strip’ that was rolling over the tracks Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Mayor Koch declared a war against graffiti on the subway cars. Yards were secured and subway cars cleaned. The lines of the New York were gradually getting clean. But there were enough walls in the city filled with pieces to made a sequel. And why stay in NYC? Published in 1987, the book Spraycan Art looked at the five boroughs and beyond.

The introduction of Spraycan Art explains that the broadened view has a reason. Graffiti had spread al over the world. Galleries discovered the hero’s of the subway and some writers even had expositions in museums. Still a little less than half of the book is filled with work out of New York. The five boroughs each had their own chapter. Then work from graffiti scenes from cities like Los Angeles and Chicago followed. But also writers from the other side of the Atlantic got their share. Trailblazers like Seen en Lee were also featured in Subway Art, but other artist that would put play a big role in the developing of graffiti were also in the spotlight. And they weren’t born in the Bronx.

One of the biggest talents of Europe was the French artist Mode 2. His work is the finest in Spraycan Art. Pieces by Mode 2 in the book are made in London and Paris and his character holding a spraycan made the cover of the book. (Worth mentioning is that in two English writers that are in the book made a name on a different level. Next to each other you see 3D and Goldie posing for their pieces. 3D started Massive Attack and Goldie became a famous drum ‘n bass producer.)

Henry Chalfant was again on the project, but this time with another partner; James Prigoff. He was an expert in community murals and had photographed one of the major documentations of mural art in the United States. Martha Cooper’s role was minimal; there are only six photos of her in the book. But one of them became an icon for the b-boy era. Cooper made in 1983 a picture of the big ‘Wild Style’ piece by Zephyr and Revolt on a wall of a handball court. And in front of the graffiti is stand the Rock Steady Crew. The photo is a classic.

A true classic.

There were other publications that documented graffiti in that time, like Graffiti Art by Allan Schwartzman. But the books didn’t make the impact like Watching My Name Go By, Subway Art and Spraycan Art. In the meanwhile the writers did their own documentation. Each person involved in graffiti made pictures of his work or work that he (or she…) admired. They were collected in ‘piece books’ or ‘black books’. In there were also sketches from yourself or writers.

Pieces could be on a wall or train for a long period, but most of the time they were quickly cleaned or painted over by other writers. So a picture of the work was the only thing that lasted. Piece books of a famous writer were filled with legendary work that was no longer there. And when there was a writers meeting, a lot of people were flipping through that book.

Some even made photocopies of the pages and handed them out among friends. And they copied the pages too. All that those lose pages need to become a primitive magazine were some staples. The first underground graffiti magazines were not much more than that, just a couple of hazy, black and white photo’s bundled together.

The power to publish, amateurishly as it was, gave graffiti scenes all around the world the opportunity to spread the work of local heroes. And preserve a works of art that were bound to be cleaned up or painted over by other writers…

Very funny in the right magazine is an advertisement of a graffiti tour to Paris.
The bus tour must have led a snail trail of tags and pieces behind itself.

Copied sketches from Mode 2 and Delta.

Bretange
Pops up on your television screen when the Tour the France is hitting that part of the country. Far more stylish than his grumpy brother, the Bask flag. Also used by patriotic American goths.

California
Animals on flags are mostly ferocious. Eagles with spread wing and a fierce look in their eyes or lions on the hind legs, clawing an imaginarily, huge sofa. But not this bear on the flag of the State of California. ‘If you want to use me as a symbol of your state, that’s fine. But I’m not gonna pose. If you’ll excuse me, I was looking for some honey’, this grizzly most have thought.

Greenland
When the sun is gone for the half of the year, it’s nice to have it on your flag. In case you forget how a sunset looks like.

Estonia
When white is used in a flag is normally in the middle. Like some kind of policeman, preventing two groups of hooligans to clash with each other. In Estonia, no more. If blue and black want to kill each other, that’s OK with white. He is no longer standing in between.

In the 1970s he became interested in photography. He designed props, backgrounds and frames. And with the help of a near by studio photographer he made self-portraits. His subject matter strayed little from his taste for detailed self-portraits, often with himself being portrayed similarly to Russian revolutionary icons. His tools were consistent, staying with Chinese ink, pencil, coloring pencils, and felt-tip pens throughout the years.

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The work of Lobanov is hip hop design avant lettre. Give Alexandre a bottle of Crystal in his hands and ad some booty and diamonds, and you got a classic Pen & Pixel Company cover.

TALK about vintage. This waterproof hoodie is more than hundred years old. Worn by Inuit in Greenland, it’s made of the guts from the seal.

It is called an anorak. Thanks to a special waterproof stitch, it protected the Inuit (also known as Eskimos) against rain and snow. They used nerves or guts for stitching. It only gave protection against the rain and snow and it was worn over jackets made of fur. In the 1920ties western clothes replaced the anoraks.
The life of Inuit depended on making good clothes. As a result they invented the parka, a heavy jacket with a hood, often lined with fur. The word parka was first used by the Aleut Inuit of Alaska.

SOMETIMES when you flip through old magazines, you see great advertisements. Like this campaign from the sixties to uplift the image of the chemical company ICI.
Chemical industries have an ungrateful job do to. Everyone uses plastic and insects on the fields have to be killed with insecticides to protect our food. But nobody likes chemical plants. In the mid-sixties the company ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) used advertisements to explain to the public what they were doing. The ads you see below are from LIFE magazines in the periode 1966 and 1967.

In the first ad ICI tells that the company has found a way to make vinyl cheaper. The ad is bragging that ICI will soon be making 30,000 tons of ‘vinyl acetate’ a year. In the drawing you see a couple of hipsters playing records. So you see, without chemical plants there is also no music…

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