(Q) How long have you been taking photos of graffiti & what interests you to do so??

(A) I travelled to NYC around ’86 and took some subway flix.. Funny enough, I just took photos of insides and no panels.. I started writing goofy stuff on walls around ’88 and got more serious around ’90, when I moved to LA..

I went to Hex’s shop and looked at the photos there and that people brought in and that got me hooked.. I started taking photos right after that first visit.. Also, right around that time is when I started seeing Can Control and that connected with me more than Subway Art or anything coming from the East Coast..

Before I connected with Susan in ’94 to collaborate on Art Crimes, I already had lots and lots of LA flix and had been trading with dudes from all around by that point.. I started a mailing list around ’91 or so online that had probably 30-40 writers.. I bet we were probably the only writers online at the time.. No one was really trading flix digitally at that point because scanners were still crazy expensive and slow and digital camera were only a dream – it was still about trading prints.. So we’d get each others mailing addresses and pass flix around that way, I guess similar to what the sticker dudes are doing now.. Before flickr and the web, my main motivation for taking flix was to get photos from other parts of the country and world.. If you didn’t send photos out, you didn’t get to see other stuff..

Now I like to share photos I’ve captured through the years and to document pieces and tags that I don’t want to forget..

(Q) Do you own photo albums of actual prints or do you prefer digital??

(A) I guess it’s pretty clear that I have lots of prints.. I’ve estimated around 15,000 prints that I’ve either taken or traded for at one point or another.. Having that many prints makes you love digital.. Especially now with things like flickr and Amazon S3 for backing up that stuff on the ultra-cheap.. A couple of years ago my storage space got flooded.. I didn’t lose any photos, but I lost quite a few zines from the 90s that will be impossible to replace, drawings, letters from people.. Now I want to digitize all my photos and will probably have to just pay for someone to do that, because I’ll never find the time to do it..

(Q) How many photos are in your personal collection??

(A) I can’t imagine how many tens of thousands of photos I have in my collection.. It is easily over 20,000, but probably lots and lots more..

(Q) Do you feel photography plays a major role in documenting graffiti culture??

(A) It’s the single biggest reason graffiti has blown up to what it is today (outside of the art itself being the coolest thing ever!!!).. Seriously, I think it was important to remove graffiti from its context for lots of people to enjoy the pure artistic part of it.. Seeing amazing pieces done illegally still gets some people upset, but if they don’t have to see it in their neighborhood, along their trackside, then it is easier for them to swallow and look at a little more objectively..

(Q) Do you have any crazy stories or memorable moments while taking photos??

(A) A few little stories come to mind, but nothing I would call crazy, really..

Susan and I went to Zurich sometime in the 90′s.. There were a couple of painted trains layed up at the main station.. To get nice shots of them you had to walk to the very end of the platform which I of course did.. After doing that we were walking over to our hotel (which was a brothel, but that’s a whole other story – always have locals book your hotels, not random travel agents), we noticed a guy following us.. So Susan has us turn a corner and just stop and wait for him to come up to us – he was clearly an undercover cop.. We just waited and surprised him as we were just standing there looking him dead on.. It was pretty funny.. He just scurried away..

Another time, I think Susan was there again, with me and Dalek.. We were going to check out Coors wall in San Francisco for the first time.. We get there and Excel AWR is painting with some other dudes.. This was right after I got put on LORDS and was all proud of it, not realizing one of my boys had just gone over a production of Excel’s.. So we introduce ourselves and boom, Excel is all up in my face about what this other dude did.. It was pretty tense and I’m glad that Dalek is like a really tall dude and I don’t think anything was going to really happen with Susan there… it was kind of funny now..

I also got a trespassing ticket in San Berdoo by being just like 10 feet in the yard out there and clearly just taking photos..

Location: Oakland, CA

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