THE LONDON LINE – Cities At Night
As one of the most surveillanced cities in the world London is also a tough place for illegal graffiti. While CCTV cameras monitor the most public spaces, the city anyway has a strong bombing scene who took up the battle against the omnipresent repression from authorities. If caught and arrested writers have to face draconian penalties like months or years in prison solely for doing graffiti.
“The harsh sentences given to graffiti writers are an indication that the system takes this ideological threat pretty seriously.”
In THE LONDON LINE the photographer takes us to a few remaining spots in which graffiti still survives, although the city follows a strict zero tolerance strategy and pieces and tags are often buffed within days. Most of the photos were taken at the city’s trainline, spots which can be seen by thousands of commuters everyday but are only sought out by writers at night.
“But if you look carefully, in the most inaccessible places, you’ll find an explosion of human expression in its most primitive and free form. And that’s trackside graffiti.”
Cities At Night did visit these locations in the night time and captured the most often two tone silver and black pieces in 35mm analog long exposure shots. The outcome are photographs and collages that portray a seemingly dead city in which the works of 4CE, 10FOOT, REVOK, KGS, ZONK, JETS, ELMO, SPUT, ACCESS, TAKE, PACES, FATSO, DEAMS, MINK and others get emphasized through this technique.
The 36 paged softcover zine also includes three texts and interviews which give insight to the situation in London. THE LONDON LINE is limited to 250 copies, each of them hand numbered.
Now available at www.hitzerot.com
