STRAAT Museum in Amsterdam is showing ART IS NOT A CRIME, an exhibition of Henry Chalfant’s photographs of New York graffiti from 1977 to 1987.
The museum says it is the first major Dutch retrospective to treat graffiti as documentary work.
The American photographer and filmmaker, born in 1940, started photographing painted subway trains on his daily rides and built an archive of more than 800 pictures, plus portraits and films of the writers.
Life-size subway trains
The largest prints show trains at full size, over three metres high and up to 25 metres wide, painted by artists such as Lady Pink, Futura and Crash.
There are also 72 metallic prints, films including Style Wars, and archive pieces such as the handwritten layout of the book Subway Art.
The Amsterdam link
In 1984 Chalfant showed his photographs at Yaki Kornblit’s gallery on Willemsparkweg in Amsterdam-Zuid.
Teenagers from Zuid copied pictures of that show and passed them around, and from there they reached graffiti writers elsewhere in Europe.
The Dutch Graffiti Library, the guest curator, supplied material for this part of the show.
After seeing Chalfant’s trains at STRAAT, you could visit one of Amsterdam’s other newer museums.