128 pages Edited by Tristan Manco & Caleb Neelon 22 x 23 cm Language: English Paperback Publisher: Thames & Hudson 2005
The book that put Brazilian graffiti in front of an international audience, and still the standard first reference on it. It moves between two registers the rest of the world had never seen coupled: the elaborate, painterly murals of São Paulo — Os Gêmeos, Nunca, Boletos, Ciro among them — and pichação, the vertical, alphabet-driven tagging that sends writers up the outsides of tower blocks with no rope and no audience but each other. Alongside the photographs sits a real history: how a scene isolated from New York codes built its own letterforms, its own social organisation and its own relationship to the city.
The credits explain the quality. Tristan Manco, already the author of Stencil Graffitiand Street Logos, handled the text; Caleb Neelon (SONIK) had been painting in Brazil since 1997 and wrote from inside the scene; and the photography is by Lost Art — Ignacio Aronovich and Louise Chin, who had been documenting São Paulo's walls from São Paulo for years. Not a survey assembled at a distance, which is precisely why it has aged well. Out of stock at the publisher, still one of the most requested titles on Brazilian writing.
