Featured Photographer - March 2017

When you travel around Italy it is hard to ignore the fairly high volume of graffiti that you are confronted with. As in Britain, most of it is awful teenager scrawl trying to be passed off as 'tags' but in some places the creativity of the graffiti was surprising and very pleasing to look at. I soon became pretty obsessed with photographing the great pieces of graffiti that I came across. Some of the images here though were never intended as 'graffiti' but rather advertising - a ripped poster or a worn out advertisement for a children's area, for example. The definition of the word graffiti is 'writing or drawings scribbled, scratched, or sprayed illicitly on a wall or other surface in a public place'. It seems to me that the inherent implication in this is that the image is unwelcome or unpleasant to look at but this is not always the case, as we know. It is also worth considering whether something that was originally advertising (legally or illegally displayed), once that advertising becomes damaged and arguably 'unsightly', does that mean it can then be termed graffiti?

Some of the 'graffiti' in these images is highly skilled artwork, some of it just a simple doodle or a ripped poster but I saw life, creativity and artistry in all of them and isn't that how you are supposed to feel about art?

~ EO