graffiti

Parking lots exhibiting Rothko and Diebenkorn paintings in Portland Oregon? That’s what I encountered during the Covid Pandemic of 2020.

New York-based photographer Felix Kunze was recently visiting the iconic Lion's Head mountain in Table Mountain National Park in Cape Town, South Africa, when he came across this sight at his favorite rock in a well-known lookout: a group of people had decided to scribble their full names into the rock that's featured in countless photos.

One of the coolest types of graffiti we've ever seen is Gifiti, where an artist paints several slightly different pieces in the same spot, photographing each piece, and then puts the photos together into a final animated piece of street art. It's downright amazing and the time required is mind-boggling.

But as cool as Gifiti is, we might have just found our new favorite photography-inspired graffiti genre: negative graffiti.

The next time you want to photograph some cool graffiti, you might want to think twice... you could get sued by the artist if that picture makes it big.

After the popular Canadian drama 30 Vies aired, graffiti artist Alexandre Veilleux recognized a tag of his in the opening sequence. Now, Veilleux -- who goes by Alex Scaner in the graffiti community -- is seeking $45k in damages from Radio-Canada and Productions Aetios Inc., stating they used his work without permission.

The world of animated graffiti, often referred to as 'GIF-iti', has a new king thanks to the street art talents of UK-based INSA and Mad Steez.

If we've said it once, we've said a thousand times: don't post illegal activity to Instagram. Because while the photo sharing service does sometimes seem to be the domain of teenaged girls with a duck face problem and hipsters who would like to share their latte with you, the police also spend time on there.

That's a lesson notorious NYC graffiti artist Peter Podsiadlo, better known as SEMP, learned the hard way this week when his Instagram photos earned him 23 felony counts of vandalism.

I first heard about 5 Pointz in a Wall Street Journal article in the summer of 2011. The article detailed the recent attempts by the owner to knock what had become an internationally-reknown street art mecca down, and build high-rise condominiums.

New York City culture site Animal recently teamed up with photographer and urban explorer 2e to document the making of some photographs in his collection “Exploring Off-Limits New York.”

From Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory to The UnderBelly Project, the video and accompanying story takes a look at some of 2e's not-so-legal and potentially dangerous adventures.

What happens when the concept of graffiti as we know it is flipped on its head? Well, I believe you end up with something like 'Painting with Lights,' a project by French photographer Philippe Echaroux -- something he calls 'Street Art 2.0.'

Back in June, graffiti artist Sofles was featured in a hyperlapse that showed him making his way around an abandoned building and creating various impressive tags at super speed. That video was received very well, so naturally, if one graffiti artist is good, four would be four times better right?

French photographer Julien Coquentin's series Please Draw Me a Wall is a curious combination of street art and photography. By having his subjects (sometimes himself) interact with wall art as if it were real, he creates fantasy worlds using only a few props and drawings that some call art and others defacement.

Typically, the only people who would take a marker to your pictures would be your kids when you're not paying attention. But wouldn't it be at least a little fun to pretend you were a kid again, take out a marker, and just go to town on a few of your photos?

Designer Brian Khouw obviously thinks so, which is why he came up with a concept picture frame dubbed the Vandalijst -- a frame that actually encourages you to doodle on your photos.

Many of the time-lapses and hyperlapses we run across follow natural events (like a massive rotating supercell) or capture the hustle and bustle of a city in a unique light. The video above does neither. Instead, photographer and videographer Selina Miles shot it while following one of the world's best graffiti artists around an abandoned warehouse as he tags it to kingdom come.

Montreal resident Jennifer Pawluck was arrested earlier this week after she posted the above photo of anti-police graffiti to her Instagram account. The photo shows a caricature of Montreal police Commander Ian Lafrenière with a bullet hole in his forehead, leading police to accuse Pawluck of criminal harassment against a high-ranking police officer.

Animated GIFs are often created with a sequence of photographs, but UK-based artist INSA puts an interesting twist on the concept by mixing the concept with graffiti and time-lapsing. For his GIF-iti projects, he paints large-scale street art pieces on various walls and surfaces (e.g. the side of a truck) over a number of days. Once each version of the piece is complete, it's saved as a photographed with a camera fixed in a certain location.

After the series of graffiti pieces is completed, the photographs are strung together into unique animated GIFs.

For his project titled "Momentum", London/Madrid-based photographer Alejandro Guijarro spent three years visiting a number of the leading quantum mechanic research institutions of the world and photographed the chalkboards there exactly as he found them. The resulting photographs look like intelligent graffiti drawn by some of the brightest minds in science.

LZRTAG is a free Android app that lets you generate QR codes associated with uploaded images -- mostly animated .gif images. The codes can be printed out and placed on walls and other surfaces. When scanned with the Android app, the codes call up the associated image and display it in an augmented reality on your phone.

You Are Not Banksy is a project by Los Angeles-based photographer Nick Stern in which he recreates popular Banksy graffiti artworks through photography.

Don't mess with Marc Jacobs. That's the lesson graffiti artists should take from a teensy little altercation between Marc Jacobs and the infamous graffiti artist Kidult. When Marc Jacobs employees awoke to a vandalized Soho boutique the morning after the Met Ball, they snapped a few photos before starting to clean it up. But instead of just stopping there and moving on, Marc Jacobs decided instead to turn the whole thing on its head, slap the photo on a t-shirt, and sell it with the caption "Art by Art Jacobs."

Glow Graffiti is an aerosol can-style light painting tool similar to …

Artist Alexandre Farto has an interesting method of 'printing' large scale portrait photographs onto walls. Instead of using paint, he scratches paint away. Starting with a guide painted onto the wall using a stencil, Farto carefully scratches and chips paint and plaster away from walls using a jackhammer, pick, hammer, and his hands. His giant photos can be seen on abandoned buildings in cities around the world, including Moscow, London, and NYC.

Street artists Jana & JS visit cities across Europe and paint portraits of themselves (and sometimes others) shooting with various film cameras. Each piece first starts out as a photograph, which is then turned into a stencil that's used to put up the painting.

Light painting is sometimes called light graffiti, but who does graffiti with flashlights? Halo is a neat light-painting tool designed by Aïssa Logerot that makes painting with light feel much more natural for people accustomed to creating... less-legal forms of art. Shaped like an aerosol can of spray paint, the tool includes interchangeable LED lights for painting in different colors and a battery inside that recharges when the can is shaken.

Street artist BLU released a breathtaking new stop-motion graffiti video called …

New York City graffiti artist Poster Boy, Henry Matyjewicz, is famed for his rearrangement of subway advertisements into bizarre …