Photographers have been taking pictures of graffiti for many decades now. I've a small collection of books dedicated to the subject, many of which are themselves considered important explorations of the act of writing on walls.
The late 80s was a phase in my life when I rarely left home without my Olympus 35mm camera. My favourite subjects were old shop signs and buildings, especially in London's East End where I was living at the time. Over the years I've posted on 'After You've Gone' various other things that I have captured on film. However I've never shown these pictures before.
They are examples of some extremely rude, crude and downright nasty swearing graffiti that I'd spotted on my travels. I took the pictures because I thought it was pretty shocking to see such bad language banded about in this way. Also, I wanted to capture this kind of graffiti as it tends to get scrubbed off or daubed over much more quickly than all the other traditional kinds of scribbles.
To confirm, the following pictures contain offensive language. As an archivist of all sorts of transient ephemera, I see it as my role to observe and document. These images are a record of some voices of the streets from around 30 years ago...
