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ricardo barros
hometown: morrisville, pa
website: www.ricardobarros.com
Graffiti photographer Ricardo Barros will both document and participate as an invited artist on this tour. His own works are in ten museum collections. When we asked him about graffiti, photography and life, we received some surprising answers.
Albus Cavus: How did you become involved in art and photography?
Ricardo Barros: I wandered into the junior high school darkroom in the 8th grade. For the next five years, photography was a really cool hobby- but my experiences were mostly about technical discovery. Then I went to this museum exhibition by a photographer named Paul Strand. My knees began to shake as I was standing in front of his photographs! At first I didn’t know what was happening, but that is when I first truly appreciated the power of art.
AC: Your knees shook?
RB: It was a physical reaction. It actually happens to a lot of people, although a more common reaction may be to cry. Anyway, that experience changed everything. Instead of photography being the object of my passion, it became the passageway through which I could learn new things.
AC: Like what?
RB: Well, graffiti, for example. I’ve been involved with art for over forty years. I thought I knew a thing or two about art and about artists. Then I met a very articulate graffiti artist, Leon Rainbow. He spoke of things that were totally new to me, things that I didn’t understand.
AC: You must be referring to more than the graffiti itself...
RB: Even now I am still learning how to decipher graffiti pieces – but what blew me away was the graffiti culture itself. It is an invisible society hiding in plain sight. Leon introduced me to the VS Crew, and as these guys learned to trust me I learned a lot about them. I learned who their girlfriends are, what is important to them, how they relate to the graffiti world. In both direct and indirect ways, these guys taught me that graffiti culture has its own values and rules.
AC: And these values and rules are different for graffiti writers than they are for other artists?
RB: Absolutely. Although only a very small number of traditional artists manage to actually sell their work, virtually all artists aspire to. Selling is an established form of validation. But selling graffiti is an oxymoron. Yes, a number of writers paint canvasses and sell them, but that is only a speck in the overall scene. Selling graffiti is not even on most writers’ radar screens. For most of the guys I know, it wouldn’t occur to them to sell their graffiti, just like it wouldn’t occur to them to sell their strut as they walk down the street. Both are a form of public performance.
AC: So if the validation is different, what is the nature of the reward?
RB: That’s different, too.
First, most committed artists will tell you that the work itself is the true reward. I understand that. For me, it is certainly true. As a member of the traditional art world, I go to great lengths to protect my work. I print my photographs using archival materials, I store the prints carefully, and I try to place the images in museum collections. My photographs are my life’s work, my legacy.
But the graffiti writers, they invest just as much sweat and passion into their pieces knowing that the ‘canvas’ they are painting on will be demolished next week. They expect it to not last. Graffiti writers will deliberately paint over each other’s work. In one poignant moment, MEK literally waived bye-bye to his graffiti as another writer wrote over it. And if one of their own pieces runs too long, they’ll come back and destroy it themselves!
AC: That is only your “first” thought?
RB: Second, the reward system in the traditional art world is linear, whereas in the graffiti world it is multi-dimensional. Most people in the traditional art community measure success in the same way. Critical reviews, museum acquisitions, published books, significant exhibitions and outrageous sale prices.
In the graffiti world, sales are out, of course. So are museum acquisitions. There does exist such a thing as critical reviews – but it happens at the grass roots level, among peers. Nobody wields power over the graffiti community like a critic at The New York Times does over the traditional art community. Lots of graffiti books are published, but nobody actually makes any money off of them. As for significant exhibitions ... well, there is a little overlap there. An example might be when Cornbread tagged the Jackson Five’s airplane. But even that was a unique, unrepeatable event.
In any case, all of these parameters are aligned. The avenue may be broad, but it is still a flat, linear, one-way street. In the graffiti world, the side streets, bridges, tunnels and cruise missiles come into play. Things shoot up, down, sideways, all over the place. Entirely different criteria are relevant to people who navigate the graffiti world. That’s what I mean by ‘multi-dimensional’.
AC: Can you be more specific?
RB: Members of the traditional art world would measure the success of a graffiti piece in accordance with its visual aesthetics. The more beautiful it is, the more accomplished the work. Visual beauty also matters to graffiti writers, but it isn’t everything.
Let’s say that, in reviewing a well-executed piece, a group of graffiti writers unanimously agree that some writer really crushed a wall. He produced a great piece. Then, as the group of reviewers walk around the corner, they see a second graffiti piece that is visually inferior. Yet they flip out over this second piece even more than they did the first one.
Why? Because they are measuring the strengths of the two, different works in two different, dimensions. The first piece may have been a wild-style, multi-colored burner, and the second one may have been a simple, white throw-up with a black outline. But let’s say that the second piece had been written on the vandal squad’s police cruiser. The element of risk suddenly pops up as a relevant factor. Whoever tagged that cruiser exposed him or herself to significant danger and left an autograph to tell the tale. That risk factor, in this case, trumps the visual beauty of the safer piece.
But there are other dimensions, too, like chutzpah, creativity, bafflement in how it was done, placement, and, most subtly, whose work the graffiti writer went over.
AC: Wait a minute; did you say you were a photographer?
RB: Yes. But this is what I meant when I said that, for me, photography is a passageway to go somewhere else.
AC: So how do you photograph that?
RB: It isn’t easy. To begin with, you have to clear your mind of prior expectations. My wife, Heather, is an art teacher. One of her favorite sayings is “Paint what you see, not what you know.” The idea is to not take shortcuts in understanding. If you really look you might see something that does not conform to your expectations, and you’ll learn a lot by figuring out why what you already know is wrong.
I spend a lot of time with the graffiti guys, listening to them, watching them, and seeing what they do. I like the graffiti, especially the pieces, but I’ve come to appreciate that the graffiti isn’t the most interesting part. The graffiti guys are, along with their sense of world order.
AC: Most other photographers zero in on the graffiti itself.
RB: That is relatively easy. That would be documentation. And it would also be easy to come in real tight with my compositions, photographing segments of their pieces to create colorful abstractions. For me, both of these choices represent low hanging fruit. I want to produce a body of work that captures the multi-dimensional aspect of the graffiti world, and I want to do it from the inside out.
AC: Can that be done only with pictures?
RB: Maybe a really good photographer might get lucky on a few shots, but even then he’d need a fairly sophisticated viewer who could decode the compositions. I certainly aspire to that goal, but I’m going to use words, too.
AC: A book.
RB: After I produced my first ton of interesting graffiti pictures, I was frustrated because I still didn’t have enough. I realized, as I tried to structure my thoughts, that photography alone could not convey the depth and the subtleties of my revelations. I’ve shared some incredible experiences with these writers and I have meaningful stories to tell. My project is still expanding into different dimensions, and the challenges are growing to occupy the greater space.
AC: So what do you want to get out of Concrete Alchemy?
RB: Fresh insight, new experiences, and to have some fun. But, you know, there is something else, too. My experience with the VS Crew opened something up for me. These writers aren’t just subjects in my photographs; they are people whom I’ve grown to care about. A few members of the VS Crew will be part of the Concrete Alchemy tour. Maybe I’ll get to know the other writers in a similar way.
AC: This will be your second book. Your first, “Facing Sculpture”, landed your own work in four or five museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Is that one of your goals here, too?
RB: That would be nice, but it’s not the point. I identify with the graffiti writers in this respect. Living the experience is my real motivation. The writers refer to their successes as ‘getting up’. That applies to me, too. Getting up, or, in my case, getting my work out into the world, will allow me to share things they have taught me.
In a certain way I am the graffiti writers’ canvas. I am the freight train they get up on. Eventually I am going to roll down the tracks and carry their message out into the world. Part of that message has to do with their graffiti, but the most meaningful measure of my success will be if I can also convey the warmth I’ve experienced in these writers’ company.
Ricardo Barros is a professional photographer based in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, where he serves corporate and editorial clients. Barros has been the Principal Photographer at the internationally recognized Grounds For Sculpture since the park’s inception in 1992. Barros’ own works are in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Museum of Art of São Paulo, the Fogg Art Museum and seven others. In 2004 he published “Facing Sculpture: A Portfolio of Portraits, Sculpture and Related Ideas” (Image Spring Press, 166 pages). Barros’ current book project has the working title “Touching the Hood: An Intimate Look at Contemporary Graffiti”. His web site is www.ricardobarros.com.
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