Kaleva is a fun magazine covering the graffiti scene across the region of Lapland and the northern city of Oulu in Finland. The content is a right-old mixture of legal walls, semi-legals, commuter trains, freights, rooftops, and tags. Various figures make an appearance along the way such as road maintenance vehicles, random people relaxing on park benches, and an assortment of characters climbing, bending, and leaning out of boats whilst creating graffiti.
Continue readingIntroduced as an attempt at “catching the graffiti twinkle of Paris”, this is the latest publication from New Utopia Press. Documenting a short trip made by Potiks to the French capital Lire Paris is a tourist’s-eye-view of the city captured between stops at the many boulangeries and cafés to be found there. Potiks takes on the role of a self described flâneur; observing and soaking up the atmosphere of Paris. Or, more specifically its famous graffiti culture.
By Andrew Finch
There was once a sprawling network of river people who inhabited the banks of Britain’s waterways. They had their own economy, customs, mythologies, and methods of reading the water’s flow to indicate incoming storms and floods, a vital role in informing land dwellers of when the foreboding channel was prone to causing destruction. They had a desire to live away from the order of natural belonging on the inner land, seeking refuge where the river flowed like jewels through the city…
It’s not too often that publications focusing on a single artist are featured on the Graffiti Review. In this case Schnellbahn is a photographic monograph presenting the work of Astro Polygon over a two and a half year period. More specifically the book focuses on the body of work produced by Astro on the ET4020 model of electric multiple units that operate on the Vienna S-bahn. Spread over nearly three hundred pages, short essays by various contributors narrate the pieces documented within. The 4020 is currently in the closing stages of being withdrawn by Austria’s national rail operator and so this project serves as something of a nostalgic farewell.
I hadn’t previously read Between so came to issue four not knowing what to expect. Covering Norwegian graffiti culture, the magazine turns out to be brilliant! What have I been missing???
Fade is a new magazine produced by Backyard Parking, a self described ‘street culture’ publisher based in Milan. This initial issue, in Italian with an English translation, revolves around a single writer, Rised, and their personal ‘metro war’. Now, before going into its content it’s worth mentioning just how nicely produced this publication is; the magazine feels quality, with nicely sized images, and well edited content. The first half contains a sort of informal interview interspersed with various photographs of trains alongside associated actions and paraphernalia. Meanwhile the rest of the magazine is given over to trains from Italy and beyond that have been given a fresh coat of paint by the artist in question.
Located in the German federal state of Hesse, you could probably be forgiven for not having heard of the modest town of Kassel (although regular readers of Graffiti Review may recall the region from previous posts). ASAP Legends is a bit of a novelty in that it unashamedly covers newcomers to the streets of Kassel. Now, my immediate question on picking this magazine up was “is this just a load of toys?” However the magazine is built around a novel concept that unites newcomers to graffiti with old hands who are merely new to their adopted town. The publication is structured as a series of interviews with individual writers about their experience of the graffiti scene in Kassel. The result is a fairly text heavy publication, all in German, accompanied by a cool variety of styles and surfaces.
Radom Teraz is a newly published magazine about graffiti culture in the central European city after which it’s named. Taking ‘Radom now’ as its focus the publication showcases images of graffiti taken in the city from around 2019 to 2021. Basically, every aspect of graffiti writing in Radom is covered here from trains to legal walls and street tags to sketches. There’s a series of particularly nice then-and-now photographs of typical Polish housing blocks showing the ageing of fresh chrome into faded white ghosts, or, in other cases, their complete obliteration by the new beige range of colours painted on the buildings’ façades. The images of graffiti are presented in a variety of formats so there’s a spread of full-colour legal walls on one page, followed by some atmospheric black and white yard photos on the next, then on another a selection of cut-and-paste style street scenes. Not all the images are strictly from Radom but, as explained in the publication’s intro, the city’s graffiti writers always carry the spirit of Radom with them.
Continue readingGraffiti is a new collection put together by Friederike Häuser which, as its German subtitle suggests, seeks to provide a range of contemporary and interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic. In his forward to the book Jeffrey Ian Ross explains that the publication is one of an ever increasing body of contributions there are on the subject. Containing fifteen chapters, ranging across diverse topics, I’ll just focus on those written in English.
I recently picked up two nice local UK zines one covering the cities of Bristol and Leicester. The former is the fourth edition of a West Country gem that I’ve read before but unfortunately have missed a coupla issues of. Covering a range of street damage this zine does everything it needs to really; lots of tags, throwups, vans, rollers, dubs, pieces and a few sketches for good measure. The city is pretty battered and the untitled zine gives a nice feel for what it’s like walking around checking out the Bristol based crews and tourists stopping by to leave their mark.
