The Faith of Graffiti

In 1972 Mervyn Kurlansky co-founded Pentagram, a London based design firm. After an assignment by Reuters he travelled to New York with photographer Jon Naar (†) and within 12 days starting in December of the same year more than 3000 photographs have been taken to capture the relatively new specific New York graffiti. Kurlansky designed and edited a book on which famous writer Norman Mailer (†) was later on invited to write an introduction for. It was published in 1974 under the title The Faith of Graffiti in the US and Watching my name go by in the UK.

The Faith of Graffiti was the first major book spotlighting the namewriting phenomenon in the Big Apple. While Naar’s shots partly captured single hits but also typical bombed cityscape impressions, Mailer’s essay puts graffiti for the first time in an art historical context and talks about the persons behind the citywide signatures who he met preparing his text.

Since the content features mainly tags, most often regarded as scribbles, and pieces just started to evolve back then the book’s influence on the international writing scene can’t be compared to the later SUBWAY ART from 1984. Anyway it is today recognized as the one of the most important publications on New York graffiti, especially since Mailer’s contribution might have paved the way for the then beginning art world’s interest in graffiti.

This revised version comes as a high quality embossed structured hard cover with a dust jacket. Jon Naar added 32 pages of additional photographs to the content and also contributed an afterword. Most of his shots are printed in the original format for the very first time. If you do not have this classic in your collection yet, we recommend getting the most comprehensive edition from 2009 now.