Five cities

About this book

"These images represent the European cities of Palermo, Istanbul, Budapest, Paris and Berlin through their surface markings. In five sequences of closely related photographs Sinclair takes characteristic features of the urban landscape - the park, the subway station, the street, the cemetery and the bridge - to explore the interaction between a city and its citizens as recorded through graffiti, from street art and tagging to declarations of love and allegiance. Yet the visible effects of the weather and the passage of time acknowledge the ultimate ephemerality of this human activity, lending the images an elegiac quality and their subject the aspect of a natural process. We are invited to look at graffiti anew: not as aggressive intrusions, but rather as part of an ongoing, collaborative transformation of the modern city." "Occupying a place between documentary and abstraction - a scrawled word or a scrap of a fly-poster are at once physical scars on a wall and marks hovering graphically on the picture plane - Sinclair's photographs work at, and call into question, the boundaries of the medium." --Book Jacket.