Craig Castleman – Getting Up Again (Forty Years Later)

Levantarse otra vez (Cuarenta años después)

In 1978 Craig Castleman worked as an English teacher at the Manhattan High School of Art and Design. Together with his students he started working on a publication on the topic they were most interested in: New York subway graffiti. The outcome was a small run publication called NASTY STUFF. It focused the work of graffiti writers and experiences he made taking photos and diving deeper into the local scene. The known ethnologist Margaret Mead pushed him to further investigate the topic which lead to the finalization (1979) and publication of his doctoral thesis in 1982: Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York. To this day Getting Up might be the most important scientific work in the field explaining the social and cultural circumstances and rules of namewriting. Antagonists like the MTA or the transit police are part of the content as well as first attempts to establish graffiti in the art world.

In 2019 Castleman donated his archive to the Spanish associations INDAGUE and Contorno Urbano. After a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2025 the publishers did put together three publications aiming to honour his research and making material accessible that slept in Castleman’s archive for over 40 years: NASTY STUFF, Levantarse otra vez and Black & White Archive.

Levantarse otra vez: cuarenta años después (Getting Up Again: Forty Years Later) is a landscape format softcover which has first been released in 2019 after the publishers got in touch with Castleman and invited him to a tour through Spain. It contains 160 never before photographs from his archives which he took during the preparation for his PhD thesis.

“Now I invite you to travel through time and view the photos reproduced here for the first time. I shot them at the Writers’ Bench, the trainyards, the platforms, the subways and the streets of New York from 1977 to 1982.”

For the 2026 release of NASTY STUFF it was republished in the same format including forewords by the associations’ presidents Esteban Marín and Jaume Gómez Muños as well as an introduction by Craig Castleman on how Getting Up came to life. The 108 pages include a variety of shots featuring posse shots, inside tags, wholecars, panels, throw-ups, canvases, gallery impressions, station photos, walls, yard shots, gang writings and political slogans, characters, and more.

It contains works from CAINE I (†), LEE, SAMO, FDT56, CHICHI133, SALSA, TRACY168 (†), CLIFF, COCO144, SJK171, MIKE171, EVA62, BARBARA62, STITCH I, EX VANDALS, SNAKE I, TUROK161, LSDॐ, IN, P.NUT2, BLADE, FUZZ (†), IZ THE WIZ (†), CAP, QUIK, SONIC, SKEME, MICO, PHASE2 (†), ALE, LORD138, MITCH77, PART 1, DONDI (†), SEEN, PJAY, SLAVE, and others.

We recommend getting all three titles to complete your collection of important New York namewriting publications. These are real must-haves!

108 pages, 24,1 x 16,5 cm, softcover
Language: Spanish/English
Release date: June 2026 (2019)
Publisher: INDAGUE & Fundación Contorno Urbano