Rene
West

City Walls

City Walls

This body of work is a series of photographs of found collages. The images are shot while out walking on city streets. As a photographer, I am attracted to the juxtapositions between advertising, graffiti, litter, textures, and the way erosion blends unrelated images together to form naturally occurring compositions.

Cities are alive with a thriving sub-culture of street art. Spurred on by the success of Basquiat, Bansky, and Fairey, this fugitive art style now flourishes in most urban areas. My aim is not to document this work, but to engage with it as a photographer and find beauty in the random interactions between the city, the people, weather, and time.

There is a tradition of recording the arbitrary marks on city walls dating back to Brassai's photographs of scratches in the stone bridges of Paris, and later Siskind's photographic response to Abstract Expressionist painters. Urban areas are in a constant state of flux and each generation's mark-making is unique to their age. In this body of work, I am concerned with photographing the unintended results of chance encounters between posting, tagging, painting, taping, and gluing on city walls and the eventual decay of this activity - and with rendering the temporary permanent.

This project began in December 2009, in the summer of 2010 I traveled 5,000 miles by car photographing in the south. So far, I have photographed in 13 states and 17 cities. The images are full-frame, with no manipulation except to dodge, burn, and adjust color and contrast in Photoshop. Images are shot with a macro lens that focuses as close as 2 inches from the subject - the photographs represent small fragments of the world greatly magnified as prints. The images are printed on a matte paper and vary in scale depending on venue; standard sizes are 17 x 9.5 inches or 28.5 x 16 inches.