Graffiti Taxonomy

A posting from Poetry Café

Graffitis are with us in all metropolises of the world and often treat us to a short moment of everydaypoetry. Sometimes they are beautiful, sometimes not – in every case you find the tag of the writer below the grafitti which displays the pseudonym of the so-called writer. For his project “Graffiti Taxonomy” Evan Roth photographed over 2,400 graffiti tags from each of Paris’s 20 districts. The photographs were then archived, tagged and sorted by letter. Afterwards Evan selected what he saw as the ten most commonly used letters by Parisian graffiti writers: A, E, I, K, N, O, R, S, T and U. From each letter grouping, eighteen tags were isolated to represent the diversity and range of that specific character.

Each of the resulting tags was digitally cropped from its surroundings and depicted as solid black on white. The highlighted letter in the tag is enlarged and placed next to the tag from which it originated. These sets were not intended to display the “best” graffiti tags in Paris, but rather the aim was to highlight the diversity of forms ranging from upper case to lowercase, simple to complex and legible to cryptic.

Links
Graffiti Taxonomy
Betonblumen.org