For San Francisco Street Artists Only

Dear SF Street Artists:

graffitisf.com now features over 1,000 images of murals and other forms of street art in San Francisco, so it’s likely that your contributions are represented here, and if they’re not yet, they eventually will be.

If your street-art-work appears in one of the photos included on the site, you’re welcome to that photo for your personal or promotional use. You can use that photo in your own site or in any publication about you. You can put it on your business card, make a T-shirt or whatever you want…

If you ask, I will give you a copy of the original files (usually a RAW or .jpg) and the processed files (usually a .tiff or .psd, sometimes a .png).  Let me know of any specific file preference or requirements.

You’re welcome to link directly from your web site to the file at graffitisf.com (but if you do this let me know so I won’t move the photo from that location) or you can place a copy of that file in your own server (my preference). Remember that the files used on the website have been optimized for the Internet and are much smaller than the original and the processed files.

The only thing I ask is that you credit the photo appropriately (Photo by Jerry A. Sierra/graffitisf.com) when you use it.

This offer applies to creators of murals, wall paintings, sidewalk stencils and anything else that decorates our public spaces with meaning or noise… and it applies equally to visiting and local artists whose works appear in photographs on the site;

If your work appeared on a public space in San Francisco, and I took a picture of it, and that picture is on the site, you can have a copy of that picture. In some cases it may be that I have other photos of your work at other locations that have not made it as far as the web site yet, and you can also have those.

Graffiti providers should keep in mind that I do not wish my images or emails used to identify your work in court and send you to jail, so if you write me, don’t admit to an art “crime” in an email that could be read by garden-variety spooks and who knows who else.

For the record (and not that this would ever come up) photos which show defaced murals will not be made available to those who vandalized them, only to the creators of the vandalized work, should they want them.

It has always been my intention that these photos exist to illuminate, not to prosecute… to help enlighten art lovers and promote street artists and showcase the unique beauty and turmoil of our times as reflected across the public space.

-

Some say that photographers are like hunters with “the killing instinct,” but not the “desire” to kill… Instead of death we deliver “eternity…” or the illusion of eternity.

It is this illusion that drives me to photograph street art locations, and I hope this serves as a proper thank you to the many street artists that make this such a unique and wonderful place in which to “hunt.”  

- Jerry

Langton near Harrison

There you are (I was) standing near the corner of Harrison and 7^th Street… waiting for the #47 line… and it’s a hot day… you’re sweating (I’m sweating) from walking the long blocks in the heat… and MUNI’s running late… (nothing new)…

You decide (I decide) to walk it… seeking the shade, hoping to luck into some new street art; traditional murals, pop-art paintings, legal advertising… even some graffiti.

The first block away from the hot corner is Langton.

You turn right (I turn right) and the clean-cut, red-colored building is your (my) first clue that something on Langton has changed… you (I) walk towards the shade of SOMA trees and you (I) realize that change can be good… it can be beautiful… soothing… when you (I) notice this new mural by Santo. New to your (my) eyes, as the mural’s already 3 or 4 months old. In mural years, that’s old enough to drive.

 

You (I) continue to walk towards your (my) destination… eventually flagging a cab, going home for a quick shower and ordering some Indian food for lunch while checking out these photos on the large monitor.

Such is life of a street art photographer. 

See more photos from SOMA.

Discover Horace Alley

It’s an alley, even though it’s not identified as such on Google Maps and the various paper maps I checked out. It’s also an art gallery, even though nobody’s talking about the murals you’ll see there.

Horace Alley, between 25^th and 26^th Streets (and Folsom and Shotwell) will reward the ambitions street art lover for temporarily stepping away from 24^th Street… 

That’s right, if your journey is limited to the treasures along the known 24^th Street corridor you might miss Horace altogether and not get a chance to stand face to face with the works shown here. And there’s so much more to see at Horace than what I’m able to show you…

The Mission District continues to surprise me with new, fresh, accessible and obscure artworks when I’m not expecting them. Whether it’s the North Mission or the South Mission, this is where the heart and soul of street art lives.

Within a short walk from Horace Alley you’ll find Balmy, Cypress and Lilac. 
“Balmy, Cypress and Lilac, oh my!”

The Most Funkadelic “San Francisco Street Art Thumbnails Gallery” In The World!

Thinking about how to organize my photographs of street art in San Francisco into a coherent web site lead me to the obvious; organize by location.

The City features numerous “locations” with many more sub-locations spread out… for example, the Mission District includes many key sub-locations such as:

Balmy, Clarion Alley, West of Mission & 24^th Street, Lilac, Bryant at 18^th, Florida at 17^th, and so on. These are complete and individual street-canvas-locations where street artists leave their mark on the world.

Some of these are obvious, and others would surprise you. So far the site includes 17 sub-location galleries in the Mission District alone. And I’m not done yet.

Eventually I wanted to also provide the option of seeing work organized by the artists’ names, and that’s part of the discussion right now behind the scenes at Graffiti SF Dot Com Headquarters. I always found this feature of SF Mural Arts an attractive one. Of course, you have to know the artist’s name to start off, and I don’t always know this until much later.

Seeing how I photograph the same artist’s work at the various locations seems important to my… let’s call it “creative growth.”

I could also see the value in organizing street art by “type;” spray-painted mural, artist’s mural, feel-good-“by-committee”-mural, youth street art, creative graffiti, destructive graffiti, political street art… and so on.

I rejected the “type” option after recognizing that one of the advantages of street art over museum art is the unexpected mixing of styles and approaches… there is no “Impressionist Wing” on the streets of San Francisco, and no “Armand Hammer Wing” at Clarion Alley.  

And then there’s the fact that “types” can be based on a viewer’s point of view… someone’s “creative” graffiti is someone else’s “destructive” graffiti… just as someone’s beautiful mural is someone else’s junk. (The same ideology can be inferred on museum work, but we give in to the “experts” that “know” what’s good for us and have chosen to display it so carefully.)

Then there’s the added factor that I don’t always know about the legitimacy of a piece of public art, and I’m sometimes surprised.  

One thing seems certain, whatever choice I make, in time other choices will walk up and introduce themselves. Sometimes politely.

I finally decided to organize the image folders by location, and made the initial galleries location-based. My thinking being that once the image location was settled, I could later create additional gallery pages by artist or any other category I chose to add more ways to view the available works.

Sometimes an evolving web site is like a growing child, with each new discovery leading to change-ripples throughout… or you could just blame it on bad planning.

The thumbnails page had its growing pains, to be sure, but it evolved into something close to what I’d been imagining. 

Even though the grouping is neither scientific nor geographical but colorful, chaotic and beautifully unpredictable, you can click on something you like to open a larger view… once there you can use the navigation system provided at the bottom of the page to see more from that location, or you can return to the Thumbnails page.

At the time of this writing there are 111 thumbnails on the page… and this number is likely to grow.  Eventually I may decide to split the Thumbnails Gallery into 2 pages… I don’t want Jakob Nielsen angry with me.

Some street art images easily lend themselves to thumbnail-abstraction. You don’t really have to crop, just shrink, while others are more problematic, though I’ve learned to think of these as “creative challenges…” and not problems.

That’s why the thumbnails have different widths but the same height… symmetry can be stimulating, but it is often overrated.  

I’ve made more traditional thumbnail galleries elsewhere…