Introduced 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.
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 readingConsidering it’s been around for seventeen years, and currently on their seventh issue, I’ve come to Unpleasant a bit late. Covering “international train writing culture” this publication has everything we’ve come to expect of high quality German magazines – it’s just a pity I’ve never picked it up before!
At 232 pages the new Auri Sacra Fames is basically a book rather than a magazine. A range of seven different chapters, each with their own style and content, rolled into one publication. This fifth instalment is the ‘Legend’ issue. So alongside two sections of Berlin trains are features on five legendary Berlin crews and individuals. The introduction defines a graff legend as having achieved “a real long-term relevance” through a combination of quality and quantity. Interestingly this description is printed alongside the dictionary definition which labels a legend as a “narrative, which can not be proved or which is grotesquely exaggerated.” Continue reading
Following a recent trip to Canada a friend kindly came back with the third issue of a tidy little magazine called Names and Places. Surprisingly this was actually the only domestic publication to be found among a wide selection of European train mags over there. Anyway as it happens Names and Places turns out to be a real gem!
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Starting out life as a black & white affair during the nineties Fumez has been given a fresh lease of life. Issue 1 of the newly released publication is now a full colour, slender looking, magazine roughly about A5 size. The cover of the mag proudly states that there are “over 100 photos” within. Considering its size, this amount of content could’ve resulted in small poor quality images. However the editor has done a good job in ensuring that the photographs are all nicely sized and of a high quality. Listing nine contributors Fumez covers nearly three decades of freight graffiti up to the present day.
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Henkireikä is a recently released magazine hailing from Sweden. The publication brings together some of the vibrant work of the graffiti artist Rikard Olsen. Working on the idea of a blackbook it is designed to display his work in a form that can be physically distributed. Olsen describes the painting of his work as a breathing-space or even a lifeline. At some time, during a conversation with a friend about art, Olsen came across the Finnish word ‘Henkireikä‘ which translates as something similar to the process of Olsen’s graffiti. With family ties to that country it seemed an obvious title for his first foray into publishing.
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