Graffiti postcards

i do graffiti myself.. can i do my own?

Of course, as long as you follow the guidelines :)

I just featured this swap on the Swap-bot blog here. Thanks for hosting a great swap!

Soooo wish I could join this swap! Grrr, new swap bot user.

As the owners of a small commercial property in the city core, it costs us an average of $300 a month to have graffiti removed from our pretty yellow brick walls (we are on a corner and 3 sides are accessible to the street). If we don't clean it up, the city fines us $400 every 5 days until it is cleaned up.

While I understand that this swap is only for photos of graffiti, shame on you, luminescentlove, for defacing other people's property, causing them financial loss, and breaking the law.

TerryF, I don't think this is necessarily about people scrawling their names or a swear-word onto other peope's property where it has to be immediatey cleaned off. The city where I live has amazing murals; street art is regarded as an art-form, and we have things like street art festivals where famous graffiti artists from other countries such as Brazil are invited to come here and owners of shops etc offer one of their walls up as a space for them to work on... People love to take photographs of these amazing colourful buildings, and they add a lot of character to what might otherwise have been a drab urban environment.

Of course, some street artists don't 'ask permission' first - Banksy is an example - but our city council still recognises his works as art worth preserving, and people genuinely like them! One example we have in Brighton is the one of two policemen kissing (our town has a large gay population). It was defaced a few years ago by someone throwing paint all over it - that's not grafitti, that's mindless criminal damage. Here are a few photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kessie/sets/72157601097368369

Other areas, like the 'subway tunnels' used by pedestrians to cross the road, would just be plain grey concrete - how depressing - why shouldn't they be colourful? We also have areas of the town where the buildings are very old (I live in England), so their architecture & appearance is protected by law, and the owners have to paint them all the same traditional colour. Graffiti woud not be welcome on those, and this is generally respected. I think we need to distinguish between people who express themselves as artists using buildings and other public spaces as their canvas, and mere vandalism. I think part of the problem here is your city fining you for the actions of someone else! If they really don't like it, then I guess they should find the people responsible and force them to clean it up, but blaming the owner doesn't seem very fair. I can see how that must be expensive and frustrating for you. But I suspect a freshy painted yellow wall looks very much like a new canvas or a blank sheet of paper to an artist.... Murals are much less likely to be defaced ;-)

And no, I've never done any graffitti myself. But please don't automatically assume luminescentlove has done anything she should be ashamed of!

If it is done with the property owner's permission, more power to them. But in my experience, most of the time it is not.