Street Walking

On December 25 I did a photo shoot under the best conditions -- the streets were deserted, and in the clear brilliant light late on a winter afternoon I photographed street murals, facades and gargoyles without having to deal with traffic and crowds.  I collected a number of new images for a collection I'm hoping to put together on street art.
Street art covers a lot of things, from  community-sanctioned murals to guerrilla art on sidewalks and signs. The artists may be known or only guessed at.  Some of my favorite images are of the blue dogs on a long-gone construction fence downtown: carefully drawn and colored, racing off into the cracks in the wall. Who did that? What other art did that person make?  Why? We'll never know. It's art for art's sake, to leave a presence in the world, or maybe to make a bit of beauty on something so functional and impersonal as a fence. Anyway, for the most part, these artists create their work on houses, walls and other public and semi-public places without a wish for fame or even acknowledgement, just for the sake of doing it.  And so I suppose that my love of photographing that kind of thing comes from a wish to capture and preserve those pieces of anonymous creativity that pop up to decorate and personalize even the most prosaic things in our day to day world.

This piece is a new favorite -- a wild little bear that's part of the facade at Hippie Gypsy on 4th Avenue. 

See more from this shoot on my Facebook page. I'll also be talking more about street photography this week on Examiner.com