Books on street art and graffiti worth owning, and what each is for
Four books on street art and graffiti worth a place on the shelf, from Subway Art to a world atlas of walls, and what each one teaches you to see outside.
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Street art is made to be seen in passing and then to vanish. A wall gets buffed by the council, painted over by another crew, wrapped in insulation boards or knocked down with the building behind it. The paint that survives longest is often the paint that was photographed well, which means that much of what people know about this art, including people who make it, they know from books.
That makes the choice of book matter more than it would for, say, Renaissance frescoes, which will be there next year. A good book on street art does more than show pictures. It tells you where the vocabulary came from, how to read letters that look like knots, and why one wall in one city became famous while a thousand others did not. The four below each do one of those jobs well. None of them does all of them, and that is fine, because together they make a short, sturdy shelf.
Subway Art: where the vocabulary comes from
If one book explains why teenagers in Zagreb, Lisbon and Athens paint letters in styles first worked out in the Bronx and Brooklyn, it is Subway Art. Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant photographed New York's painted subway trains in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the book first appeared in 1984. Chalfant's habit of photographing whole cars as they rolled past, frame by frame, meant that complete pieces could be seen at once, as their makers meant them. Cooper photographed the writers themselves, at work and in their own neighbourhoods.
The book travelled further than the trains ever could. Writers in European cities who had never been to New York learned the forms of letters, the shapes of arrows, the idea of a whole car, from these pages. Chalfant also worked with the director Tony Silver on the documentary Style Wars, released in 1983, which makes a good companion on a winter evening. By the end of the 1980s the transit authority had taken painted cars out of service, so the book is also a record of something that ended.
It suits anyone who wants the roots, and anyone who has stood in front of a wall of wild letters and wondered why it looks the way it does. It says little about murals, stencils or anything outside one city, and it does not pretend to.
The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti: the wide view
Rafael Schacter, an anthropologist and curator, organised his atlas by place rather than by period. It moves across continents, artist by artist, with photographs of walls and short texts on who made them and where. The effect is of a very long walk through cities you may never see, with a guide who knows which corners to stop at.
Its strength is breadth. It shows how differently the same impulse plays out in different places, and how much of what looks local on your own street has cousins on other continents. The cost of breadth is depth: no single city gets more than a few pages. Read it to find out what exists, then look elsewhere to understand any one place properly.
This is the book for travellers planning where to go next, for teachers who want examples from many countries, and for readers who already know one scene and want to see beyond it.
Graffiti Alphabets: learning to read letters
Most people walking past graffiti cannot read it, and that is partly the point. Claudia Walde, who paints under the name MadC, asked writers from many countries to set out complete alphabets in their own styles. The result is a book of letterforms: the same twenty-six characters bent, stretched, interlocked and decorated in one style after another.
Its use is practical. After an hour with it, the tangle on a railway wall starts to resolve into letters, and the letters into a name, and you begin to notice that names repeat across a city. Designers and type enthusiasts find it useful for its own sake. It is light on history and says almost nothing about murals, which is not what it is for.
Give it to the curious walker who wants to read walls rather than just look at them, to students of lettering, and to young people who want to try letters on paper before they ever think about a wall.
Banksy: one artist in his settings
There are many books about Banksy, the anonymous artist from Bristol, and this large-format Rizzoli hardback by the Italian curators Stefano Antonelli and Gianluca Marziani is one of the more substantial. What makes it worth including is that it presents the works in their street settings, so you see a stencil with the drainpipe, the doorway and the passers-by around it. That context is half of how his work operates. A rat on a gallery wall is a picture; a rat at the foot of a real wall is a joke about the street it sits in.
It is a book about Banksy, not by him, and readers should treat it as an outside account. It also tells you little about the wider scene he came out of, which is where the other three books come in.
Readers who came to street art through his work, which is a great many people, will get the most from it, as will anyone interested in how a single artist's pieces change meaning when they are cut out of walls, sold or protected behind plastic.
Choosing between them
If you only want one, start with whichever gap is largest in what you already know. The table is a rough guide.
| Book | What it is | Read it if | It will not give you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subway Art | Photographs of painted New York trains and their writers | You want the origins of graffiti writing | Murals, stencils, Europe |
| The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti | A survey by place, artist by artist | You want to see what exists around the world | Depth on any one city |
| Graffiti Alphabets | Complete alphabets by writers from many countries | You want to read letters on walls | History or context |
| Banksy | A large hardback on one artist, works in their settings | You came to street art through his work | The scene around him |
These picks come from publisher details and published reviews rather than our own testing.
What the shelf leaves out
All four books lean towards New York, Western Europe and the best-known names. Very little of what you see in Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo or Thessaloniki appears in any of them, and the same is true of most mid-sized cities anywhere. The writing on those walls is documented, but in other places: small-run zines, festival catalogues, exhibition booklets from local galleries, the archives of photographers who have walked the same streets for twenty years, and city records of commissioned walls.
These are harder to find and worth the trouble. A local library or a university art department is a good first stop, and a bookshop that stocks small presses is a better one. Commissioned murals also leave a paper trail, in permits, design approvals and contracts, which is a different kind of documentation; the process behind them is laid out in a piece on how a large mural gets made.
Books also flatten one thing that matters on the street: who the wall belongs to. A photograph of a piece on a family's front door looks much like a photograph of a piece on a legal wall. The difference is clearer when you stand there, and it is at the centre of the argument in a piece on Athens walls and empty buildings.
Taking the books outside
None of these is a pocket book, and none should go on a walk. The way to use them is in the evening before. Read a chapter, then go and look at a wall with a new question in mind: how the letters connect, which piece is answering which, where the artist stood, what the wall was before. The self-guided Berlin street art walk is a good place to try that with Subway Art fresh in your head, because writing culture across Europe took much of its early vocabulary from the same New York sources.
More writing on murals, monuments and work in public space is collected in the public art strand. Start, though, with whichever of the four fills the biggest gap, and read it slowly, with the wall at the end of your street in mind.
