Subway Art

Graffiti books are so common these days it is hard for me to really understand what a break-out document Subway Art by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant was for its time. This, along with the 1983 PBS documentary Style Wars (by Chalfant and Tony Silver), give a thorough survey of graffiti art and culture in New York in the early 1980s.

Subway Art was first published by Henry Holt in 1984 and is currently in its 19th printing. It boasts 239 color photographs featuring the painted trains of the New York MTA lines, plus other photos of the writers themselves painting and hanging out. Laid out as panoramic whole cars from multiple photographs, plus details on tags and characters, this book lays the design groundwork that is repeated in just about every graffiti book and magazine unto this day.

This book greatly differs from (and in my opinion, is superior to) subsequent graffiti publications in several ways... aside from the fact that it is the original. The book features a lot of photos of the writers themselves (and none of them are covering their faces). It is also written with the layman audience in mind: Broad explanations of "style" and brief descriptions of "characters" and "going over" in graffiti culture abound. While this may make the written content of Subway Art quite trite and comical to graffiti fans of today, I actually find this type of writing preferable to the strictly ultra-insider vernacular employed within most modern graffiti literature.

The vocabulary section of the book demonstrates that the lingo of graffiti was already set in stone by 1984 (bite, bomb, buff, getting up, hit, piece, throw-up, toy, writer...). Except the train lingo (ding-dong, ridgy, lay-up...).

Much of the art is made by graffiti legends like Lee, Seen, Pink, Skeme, Kase 2, Dondi, Iz, and Blade, but the book is not broken down into sections by artist or crew like so many others, it is separated into subject chapters like History, Vocabulary, Techniques, Writers & Crews, Kings, and Opposition. Unlike Style Wars, this book does not cover the breadth of hip-hop culture (rocking the mic and rocking your body with breakdancing). Subway Art, as the title would suggest, is all about art on the subway trains. No attention is given to non-train graff at all.

This book is an essential component to any street art library. It is definitely the best document of 1980s NY graffiti, and the painting and stories that go with them are wonderful. Along with Style Wars, which is my favorite documentary of all time, this is a full and detailed portrait of an amazing but long gone era. King of the yakkity-yak yard!

You can watch Style Wars online right now.

You can order Subway Art from the Rowan Morrison online store for $22 plus shipping by clicking this link: