184 pages Photographs by Eddie Text(s) by graff.media, Kubrick 24 x 16.8 cm Language: Deutsch, English Paperback Publisher: Munich Graffiti Library First edition of 200 copies 2024
In the late 1990s, a strange guy with thick glasses and a Polaroid camera became an unlikely fixture at Munich’s S-Bahn stations. His name was Eddie. While others reached for spray cans, Eddie chased after departing trains, capturing panels, tags, and wholecars with an outdated instant camera he had found at home with his parents.
The Polaroid was hardly suited for documenting graffiti—too small for wholecars, too imprecise for detail—yet Eddie held onto this method with stubborn passion. Influenced by punk music and his older brother, who had once photographed political slogans in the same way, Eddie discovered graffiti in 1997 and began building a personal archive in his childhood bedroom. Stacks of instant photos, labeled with writers’ names whenever he could decipher them, soon turned into a unique visual diary of Munich’s scene.
Eddie became a phenomenon: everyone seemed to know of him, yet nobody really knew him. A quiet, restless figure, scanning his surroundings like a human radar, he was the first true “spotter”—a photographer who didn’t paint himself, but obsessively documented graffiti, mostly on trains. Embedded journalism, long before the term existed.
Thanks to a stroke of luck, Eddie’s original Polaroids have been preserved. This publication brings them together for the first time: a raw, analog Instagram from the late ’90s, a time capsule of colorful graffiti, fleeting trains, and one man’s obsessive gaze.
