London - Street Art
On Monday this week, I went to a Banksy exhibition in South Kensington which made me think it would be good to talk about street art in London. Street art is a wide ranging category covering graffiti to full sized commissioned murals covering whole buildings. In this case I’m going to cover mostly art which I don’t think has been commissioned but has been painted for fun or exposure only.
London has got to be one of the best places to see street art in the world, surely? There are multiple places to go to see vast tracts of ever-changing art and the variety of subjects is stunning. Two of my favourites are Leake Street Tunnel near Waterloo and Brick Lane/Shoreditch. These are the areas that attract the most tourists as well. Areas which are more off the beaten track are generally anywhere alongside a canal, especially under bridges. Or you can head alongside a railway line with arches underneath and you won’t walk too far to find something surprising.
Both a negative and a positive about street art is that it’s not curated and it’s generally not controlled. So, you can find some pieces that you think are absolute gems but when you pass that same spot later, it’s been covered up by something which appears to your eye to be just a crazy mess.
I’ve got a big collection of street art photos so I wasn’t quite sure where to start. I could fill a book with them but since I want to get this blog out in no longer than 6 hours, I’d better pick a few off the top and just cover those. I hasten to say that these aren’t all my favourite images but since I don’t have all my photos keyworded yet (also a longer term plan), I’ve chosen ones I can find easily.
The most common subject I guess is the graffiti tag. A funny thing happened recently with one of those. If you live in London you might have seen a tag which is 10FOOT. It’s certainly common is south London. As we were driving through Devon on our way home from a holiday in Dartmouth in August, we spotted a 10FOOT tag on an electricity box on a long stretch of countryside road with no visible place to park - you know those narrow roads. Was he/she on holiday and shouted? “Stop the car! I’ve got to get out to tag this box in the middle of nowhere!” Was it a copycat tag? Puzzling!
Anyway, to give this blog a structure I’ve arranged my images into 4 categories. Food, Faces & Cultures, Famous People, Streets & Structures.
You can click on any of the images below to see them in a full size lightbox or tab through them within each gallery.
FOOD
This pops up surprisingly often for a street art subject. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. In traditional framed art, still life food is a favourite subject.
FACES and CULTURES
FAMOUS PEOPLE
STREETS and STRUCTURES
This category isn’t so much about the subject of the art but where it’s positioned. Tunnels, bridges and arches are all popular. Walls in certain areas seem to be fair game, although how people who’ve bought brand new flats in graffiti prone areas feel about that is another matter. Whole houses and buildings become covered, although I do think quite a few of these are by commission. Then there are doors, windows, window frames, chimneys (no matter how high or how low on the building). Similarly lamp posts, benches, electricity and telecommunications boxes, basically anything that doesn’t move, no matter how small, all become a canvas.
Well, I could have carried on with this for hours more but it’s taken me quite a while to gather and resize all these images for the web, so I’ll have to stop here. I said at the beginning that I felt I could fill a book of street art and this has only strengthened as I’ve gone on. I feel I’m cutting this short. If you want to ask a question about any of these feel free to message me. If I’m taking a photo of a piece that someone has signed or tagged, I always try to capture the signature as well. Although it’s not always possible.
If this has inspired you to get out and photograph some street art in London, then a good starting point is Shoreditch High Street tube station, in addition to the locations mentioned above.
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Yours
Loren x