Urban art is a contemporary style of art that relates or depicts cities or city life created by artists who usually live in the city. The most common form of urban art is graffiti or street art and there has been of course a lot of controversy about whether this is really art or just vandalism.
Graffiti have been used as more than just an expression of an artist's talents. Gorillaz is a band whose band members have been animated using a graffiti, urban style for example, and this style has been used increasingly by bands to appeal to their target audience.
As well as various advertising campaign, the area that most intrigues me is those trying to send a message through the graffiti, or as said before, demonstrating their talents.
Banksy is probably one of the most famous graffiti artists. From Britain, Banksy uses dark humour in his stencil designs to challenge and ridicule usually political issues and therefore is famously a political activist. Banksy uses his work to spread his views rather than to gain an income, as he has never directly sold copies of his work himself, and this I feel really sums up street art and graffiti. It's about spreading their message, whether it's 'sticking it to the man' or just rebelling against the society that have branded this art as vandalism. Although there are obviously the vast majority that create graffiti in order to just be 'cool', for this project I'm going to focus on the more purposeful meaning of graffiti. Where there is an actual meaning.
This isn't the only form of 'graffiti' I want to look at, after seeing that the majority of street art and graffiti are created on unusual canvases (that we don't usually associate with traditional art anyway) I decided to look at other forms that could be considered as a form of graffiti in a sense. Tattooing is the marking made by inserting indelible ink into the skin and creating permanent markings for decorative or other reasons. This can be considered a form of graffiti and certainly urban art as again there is a strong stigma with having tattoos and people with many are associated with a certain stereotype.
Again, there are very different reasons for people to have tattoos, just as there is for people who create street art. There are those who just simply want a tattoo for the aesthetics, to add to their look. Whereas there are also people who decide to get a tattoo for various reasons, such as a memorial, a transition to another stage of their life, or celebration of something or someone. Again, this deeper meaning of urban art is what I want to focus on for this project, even if it doesn't come across in the photos straight away, there will be stories behind them.
This isn't yet my definite approach to this project, as I still need to find who to photograph and look at existing styles of photography for this area.
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