208 pages Photographs by Helmut Schmitz Foreword by Detlef Michel 30 × 21.3 cm Language: German Hardback Publisher: Rixdorfer Verlagsanstalt First edition 1982
Spray-Athen collects spray-painted inscriptions photographed on the walls of West Berlin in the 1970s and early 1980s, many of them political slogans. Helmut Schmitz shot them in black and white. The book keeps the wording as it was written: a few hurried words that turned an ordinary wall into a public statement. Gathered in one volume, the marks can be read against each other, for what they say and for how they were painted. The photographs preserve writing that would otherwise have been painted over or passed without notice, and show a divided city through the words its inhabitants chose to leave in the street.
