Belfast’s Writers
Never meet your heroes. Well, that’s the conventional wisdom. I have a couple of heroes who became heroes to me after I met them, but supposedly, your favourite musicians and authors can never crack up to your imagination of them. Meeting my favourite graffiti artists is something I sometimes think about.
I’m not talking about Banksy or other street artists like that, who work legitimately or otherwise, I’m talking about the people who have a ‘tag’ that they paint on any available surface that will show off their identity, their skill or their territory.
Maybe hero is too much for what I think of graffiti artists. I certainly wouldn’t like graffiti on my own property, but I am a huge fan of the illicit ‘tag’ painted in public spaces. It’s partly due to my interest in graphic design (logos, letterforms, etc.) and partly due to my interest in the sociology of tagging.
Belfast seems to have an unique graffiti scene. The city is relatively small, so it can only support a small number of ‘writers’. These people whom I only know by their tags, like TMN, ANCO, RMS, 4FUN, GECO, NOTA and many others are a consistent presence on spare surfaces all round Belfast.
After a while you recognise the regulars. Then you see who goes writing with who. Then you marvel at how they get to the vantage points needed to create some of their designs. Some writers get painted over, either by landowners or other writers. Some writers go long distances and get to impossible sites. Some writers have a certain patch or don’t do the crazy sites. Some writers experiment with their tags. Some writers stay the same. Some writers go all out to tag every surface, even if only with a marker pen. Some just go for a few big, colourful tags here and there.
I love to take photos of tags and I have a small flickr album of them, which is an humble contribution to the lovely results of a flickr search for “belfast graffiti”. I’m not the most accomplished photographer, so I limit my photos to being a typology so that the tags can speak for themselves. I try to get a sense of the location of a tag in my photos, but by using a GPS-enabled camera (like most smartphones), you can focus more on getting the tag itself since the actual co-ordinates are stored in the image’s metadata.
Focusing on the tag also lets you compare the tags simply as tags so that you can examine things like an artist’s progression, or their use of space. The tight framing can sometimes lose the sense that a tag was painted in a particularly dangerous place, but I also take photos that capture more of a scene. You can’t be too rigid in your art. Certainly, although the writers are pretty consistent, they do experiment from time to time.
Two of the best ways to view Belfast’s graffiti are by foot and by train. Going by foot you’re naturally limited in time and the breadth places you can go, but you can often see tags you would otherwise miss, or get up close easily for a photo if the location is right. The train often lets you see from higher up, and although trains are deadly, writers will much more often tag the concrete beside a train line than beside a motorway.
Unfortunately for me, I’m not happy with the results of most of the photos I take from the train, so I take this opportunity to offer my services to Northern Ireland’s Transport Holding Company, which owns NI Railways, to work with them to photograph the graffiti near the railways that would be too dangerous to capture without official co-operation. To me, while the graffiti around the trains shouldn’t necessarily be condoned, it’s a wonderful, colourful addition to what would otherwise be soulless concrete and I think the tags should be recorded for posterity before they are cleaned up.
But that’s just taking photos of the end product. Sometimes you start to wonder about the artists themselves.
What could I gain from meeting the Belfast Writers? I’m awkward enough socially with my own friends and acquaintances. What would I say to 4FUN, ANCO, TMN or RMS? Would I ask them why they tag? Why they go for the most dangerous locations? Where they get their paints? Who are their influences? Who do they learn from? Do they travel to other cities? Do they have ‘normal’ jobs? How often have they been prosecuted? What’s the gender mix?
I suspect if I did meet them, I’d say something like “I really like your work,” and they’d say “thanks, don’t tell the feds,” and that would probably be that.
