Street Art in the 1970s

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

The Faith of Graffiti presents the reader with beautiful full-spread photographs of street art by Jon Naar and Mervyn Kurlansky with an accompanying text by Norman Mailer.   By keeping the text separate in the center of the book, the reader is able to fully immerse himself in the photographs and experience the depth of street art as an exhibit.  Mailer’s description of the art and history of graffiti draws the reader in further with anecdotes and stories about the great street artists.  The definitive book on graffiti and street art in their early incarnation in the 1970s, this book is sure to interest aficionados as well as those just browsing the topic.

Norman Mailer, a novelist and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, pens the essay portion of this book, delving deep into the history of street art and its cultural importance.  The essay is art in itself, pairing more traditional forms of art with stories of graffiti artists to weave a narrative about the impact of this new art form.  Joined by photographers Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar, with their images of hundreds of examples of street art around New York City, The Faith of Graffiti is an intriguing and thorough experience.  Their  eye for photography allows the reader to understand both the intricacies of graffiti as well as the environment it lives in by taking large scale landscape photos and juxtaposing them with detailed close ups.

A first edition copy signed by all three authors is available in the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection at Widener Library.  The faith of graffiti. Documented by Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar. Text by Norman Mailer. New York, Praeger [1974]

Thanks to Emma Clement, Santo Domingo Library Assistant, for contributing this post.