The failure rate of hard drives is 100%. One day, when IG, Google and all of us have ceased to exist, a future cro-magnon will dig through the rubble of our civilization and find a shiny plastic bag with a zine in it. In its tattered, but remarkably well-preserved pages, she’ll see many photos of strange handwriting. Comparing it to the faint remains of paint on the crumbled walls of what was once a great city, she’ll realize that the scribblings were a way of saying “I was here”, and that, if the old ones could do this, she could do it, too.
Tag Archive Vol. I is part of my continuing effort to preserve graffiti in an analog format that resembles a random walk through the city (except where it doesn’t). In other words, it’s hundreds of photos of a bunch of tags I like, some newer and some older. But that does not mean that these are the best tags, or that the names in here are totally representative of graffiti in NYC, or that this project will ever achieve completion. It’s a sample, and it’s biased, but I’ll keep producing more of them, so if your name isn’t in this one it might be in the next one or the one after that. Let’s give those future archeologists something to analyze.
Tag Archive Vol. I consists of 60 pages featuring around 680 photos. It’s perfect-bound, full-color, with a hand-assembled cover, hand-numbered out of 300 copies.