Images to Live By

Recently, I spent a little over three weeks in Berlin. It’s the first time I have visited this city. I therefore had no firsthand sense of its backstory, or context, or history, my knowledge of it and its street art was based only what I had read or heard from others or seen online. Throughout my time there it felt as though there was always something new to learn – one gigantic learning curve….

For Berlin is a city whose surfaces are almost entirely covered in images, many of them illicit. The sheer number of these uncommissioned images is remarkable: walls are tagged, postered, and painted; street signs are stickered, and rooftops spray painted to a degree that simply doesn’t occur in cities such as Paris or London or New York. And although there are other European cities, such as Athens or Budapest, where a vast amount of wall writing can be found, in Berlin what is striking is the diversity of images and the variety of locations for their placement. Old school graffiti is common, but so are paste-ups, stickers and stencils. Bill posting is an ingrained feature of the cityscape, covering hoardings and walls, sometimes many layers deep:

The placement of images isn’t limited to those walls readily accessible to artists; any surface can be altered, with rooftops, hard-to-reach signal boxes, train carriages, and the undersides of river bridges being covered by illicit art.

There’s so much to say about Berlin, it’s impossible to say much in one post. I’ll be writing several when I get the chance (I am currently travelling in the Highlands of Scotland, without much access to the internet). So here I’ll simply say this. I spent three weeks and three days in Berlin and saw more illicit art (and more types of illicit art) than in pretty much any other city I’ve been. I took hundreds of photographs, but I could easily have taken hundreds more: after a while, I had to stop, because the vast number of tags, throw-ups, stickers, paste-ups and so on started to seem commonplace. I met many artists and ran out of time to meet more of these generous and friendly people, willing to give up their time to talk with me. Three and a half weeks, and this was only scratching the surface, in a city where the surfaces are quite literally indistinguishable from images.