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New York 1973 I am standing on the elevated platform at 161st Street in the South Bronx taking photographs of the 'painted trains'. I look out over Grand Concourse and watch FDNY fire-fighters hose down the smouldering remains of a tenement building burndown, as another slum landlord decides to cash in his chips. Police sirens howl and whine a few blocks to the south and an open-top Buick Roadmaster cruises past on the street below. Two large cabinet speakers resting on the back seat of the convertible blast out a bass heavy 'Bewildered' by James Brown, all horn riffs and wah-wah guitar. Oddball characters saunter along the platform waiting for the downtown train and as they pass by I get various offers to enlighten me about Jesus, to purchase any kind of drug, to buy a 'nice Rolex watch' and suggestions as to where I should stick my Nikon. I graciously decline all offers and make a mental note to keep the camera out of sight. The rails shudder and vibrate as the Lexington Avenue Express, heading down through Manhattan to Atlantic Avenue pulls into the station.Exposed to strong sunlight, the colour of the graffiti writing is more vibrant than when seen underground and the letter- forms that spread along each and every carriage delivers an explosion of creativity, a haunting presence in its originality and power to shock. The sprayed paint is fresh and bright and recent attempts to clean the carriage windows with solvent gives off an acrid smell in the 90 degree heat. As the departing crowd surged to the exit I start to click the camera shutter. My first encounter with significant graffiti writing had been in 1969 in my immediate neighbourhood around London's Notting Hill. The Post-Situationist group 'King Mob', which included activist/art student and future Sex Pistols manager, Malcolm McClaren, was responsible for a graffiti blitz on the streets of West London that often included quotes from the romantic poets. On the walls of Powis Square I witnessed William Blake's lines 'THE ROAD OF EXCESS LEADS TO THE PALACE OF WISDOM' - within days WISDOM was changed to WILLESDEN (a North London Suburb).In Basing Street W11, I photographed William Blake's 'THE TIGERS OF WRATH ARE WISER THAN THE HORSES OF INSTRUCTION' with added tags including 'rent revolt', 'Rangers', 'John' and 'Paul'. On Portobello Road, with another nod to the Beatles and a sardonic goodbye to the year of Peace & Love was 'ALL YOU NEED IS DYNAMITE' along with 'BURN IT DOWN', 'DYNAMITE IS FREEDOM' and 'GET HIGH ON DYNAMITE'. My favourite graffiti piece, running for half a mile on a wall alongside the subway line from Ladbroke Grove to Westbourne Park in 4 foot high letters and seen daily by thousands of commuters was: 'SAME THING - DAY AFTER DAY - TUBE - WORK - DINNER -WORK-TUBE-ARMCHAIR-TV-SLEEP-TUBE-WORK-HOW MUCHMORECANYOUTAKE-ONEINTENGOMAD-ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP'. However, this graffiti writing could not prepare me for what I was later going to see in the badlands of New York City. During my visits to New York in the 1970s I observed a scenario of both hope and despair. The city was in financial crisis with debts of over a billion dollars with an infrastructure in decay.Federal money for new housing had been diverted to help finance the war in Vietnam and over 600,000 jobs had been lost over a five year period in New York City alone. For all its perceived style, fashion and glamour, New York was a city of 'haves' and 'have-nots.' Alongside the magnificent Art Galleries and Museums, the world-famous Department Stores and tourist sites, the Empire State Building, The Chrysler Building, The Statue of Liberty and Greenwich Village, there was another New York City, one of urban decay, with crumbling buildings abandoned by their owners because tenants could not pay the rent, unemployment, abject poverty and drug abuse. These desperate conditions had given rise to notorious street gangs and crime that spread city wide. Urban poverty and ghetto mentality had no greater symbol in the 1970's than the South Bronx. Taking the crowded subway ride into Manhattan after arriving at JFK Airport in 1973, I had witnessed a lightning flash of colour on the steel exterior of the Manhattan bound subway train. Inside the carriage, walls and windows were covered with the spontaneous line of black magic-marker pen, the scrawls of omnipresent 'tags'.Across the carriage, from the blown- out speakers of a ghetto-blaster resting on the shoulder of a young dude, Bob Dylan howled that 'something is happenin' here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?' This was New York Graffiti and these 'tags' communicated a powerful welcome message from 'the ghetto'. Travelling around the city, I became intrigued by the spray-painted names on the subway trains and decided to photograph these images. However, the constant frenetic conditions of the New York subway made it impractical to photograph the graffiti from the underground platforms and I quickly found out that flash photography attracted far too much unwanted attention. An American friend suggested that I travel up to Harlem and the South Bronx, to the elevated tracks of the New York Transit Authority, to see the painted trains in daylight. I headed uptown with my camera, to the platforms of 125th Street through 149th St Grand Concourse and on up to 161st Street.I watched the trains roll down the tracks in a constant stream, the carriage exteriors plastered with an exuberance of imagery that to my European eye was an exotic visual mix of pop art, jazz, cubism, Puerto Rican- funk, abstract expressionism, bebop and jive. The names flashed past creating a literary rhythm of beat poetry, MICO / MICO / SUPER STRUT / HONDO / VAMM / JIVE STEP / KING / SIN/PRIEST/STIMONE/TOOBUG/YAZ/JTJTJTJT/PHASE2 / RUBEN / SILVER TIPS / CASH / BLADE / STAFF 161 NONSTOP /ROX/DOCCOOL/LILHAWK/TRACY/SOULGAG/CLIFF/ STONEY DICE / RIFF / CRACHEE / STAY HIGH / DEATH / KILL / CHICO / CHICO and on and on. This creative surge of spray- can art represented a defiant outlaw attitude of rebellion that had insidiously become a part of every day life for all those living in or visiting New York City. The vibrant subway train spray-can paintings had separated the 'artists' from the 'taggers' and took a turn for quality rather than quantity. This was a form of self-expression that communicated the artists' ideas and identity to other writers and to a wider public regardless of cultural, linguistic or racial differences. It was a creative revolution; innovation had hit a new peak.I photographed an early piece by KING and TRACY 168 with the adjoining words 'WILD STYLE'. The painting oozed artistic talent, with complex geometric letter-forms that contrasted difficult readability with a vibrant camouflage of colour. Individual technique was obviously one of the most important aspects of graffiti writing and there was huge prestige in creating an original writing and lettering style. I captured a number of striking pieces by the writer BLADE that equalled much that I had seen on gallery walls. A window-down piece in white, red and pale blue consists of a complex image of balanced calligraphy with each letter sumptuous in its form. The background cloud with horizontal blue lines on red creates a vision of motion that is perfect for this steel canvas. A powerful whole-carriage piece by BLADE and JOHN150 with a large painted eye covering the carriage door between the two names is a striking visual form of communication and inventiveness. Shared spray paint cans between the two writers, has resulted in a unified whole-car masterpiece that exudes confidence in execution.Other highlights include the carriage with the surrealistic JTJT repetition, the ambitious painting of a silver submarine with the writer's name VAMM emblazoned along its side, the series of artworks by CLIFF159 and the explosive, painterly masterpiece by HYSEN. Earlier, walking around 42nd Street, Broadway and Coney Island, I had soaked up the City environment that was the downtown playground for these graffiti writers. Unlike today's ultra-safe, corporate, neon-clad theme-park, Times Square in the 1970's was full of rubber-necking tourists, hustlers, pimps, religious freaks, vagabonds and big-time losers. It was lined with theatre marquees of ten thousand light bulbs featuring porn shows, seedy restaurants, novelty souvenir stores and fast food joints against a backdrop of gigantic painted billboards and hoardings. I thought of the great American 'Pop' artist James Rosenquist, now recognised as one of the most significant artists of the 20th Century, who had earlier worked for the appropriately named General Outdoor Advertising Company in Times Square as a billboard painter. He borrowed source material and inspiration from this experience for his paintings.Rosenquist was always a vocal advocate for the paintings on the subway trains as was fellow 'Pop' artist Claes Oldenburg who famously said, "You're standing there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy, and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America." I photographed billboard painters on precarious trestles hanging high above street level, hand painting a 90 foot high film poster for 'The Master Gunfighter' and a western clothing hoarding for Sergio Valente with a 75 foot painted cowboy wearing designer jeans and raising his stetson hat. Lower down Broadway the whole side of a twenty-storey building had been painted as an open carton of Winston filtered cigarettes. Little wonder that with this visual overload the kids from the South Bronx would have the inspiration and confidence to paint their name 'big time' on the subway train. I took this series of subway graffiti photographs during visits to New York in 1973 and 1975.I was aware that Harlem and the South Bronx were virtually no-go areas of New York City for visitors and hanging around the elevated tracks could be seen as an invitation to a mugging. I recalled Henri Cartier-Bresson saying shyly that he only used his camera as an excuse to see the world. That was all I needed, I had my camera and I had my excuse to be there. I wasn't to know that I was capturing these remarkable images some five years before Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant started work on their series of photographs we've all seen in the book 'Subway Art' and that Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat had yet to ride the graffiti train to art world triumph. According to 'Old School' writer Michael Tracy, 1973 was the best year for graffiti, with an explosion of style, expression and unique imagery hitting the steel canvas. Here in the South Bronx, I was in the right place, at the right time, to capture this important artistic, social and historical photographic record of early New York City subway graffiti. 1970's New York subway art is now seen as the 'Golden Era' of graffiti.Thirty five years on, the influence of this early work can be seen in practically every city in the world. 'Old School' writers from New York City have become legendary urban heroes throughout the world and these photographs underline and reinforce that status.

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