Seeing Street Art Through the Camera

Fall is a time of decay for the natural landscape, but photographer Charlene Weisler isn’t watching the changing of the leaves: She’s keeping an eye on the urban landscape. Since 2005, Ms. Weisler has roamed the city looking for the decayed layers of street art that, when framed by a camera lens, become something more than vandalism. For her ongoing project, “Urban Montage,” she has taken more than 5,000 photographs of what she sees as an anarchic form of art making. “I don’t photograph acts of graffiti per se. I am drawn to the decay and chaos and how that becomes part of the art,” she said.Contemporary street art often develops a collage appearance due to multiple artists’ responses, the effects of the weather, and the deterioration of the materials used. Aerosol spray-painting can be covered by stickers, wheat pasting, and drawings made with stencils. “For me, the challenge is how to draw out beauty from chaos and decay,” Ms. Weisler said. “Because the beauty is there. A haunting beauty.”Despite the ascendancy of some graffiti artists into well-known gallery stars, most work anonymously and furtively. Typically, after one tags a wall, that drawing becomes the object of subsequent interactions on that space. Ms. Weisler uses her camera to capture this mutating landscape. “It happens very quickly. I will walk by a wall of street art one day, and the next morning it has already been altered,” she said.Ms. Weisler, whose last solo exhibition was at the Kevin Barry Gallery on Staten Island, has shown her work in Japan and within Bloomingdale’s SoHo location. She credits her father for first drawing her attention to the creative possibilities of photographing street art. “In the early 1980s, my father began to photograph the spray-paint murals that sprang up all over city — just because he enjoyed them,” Ms. Weisler said.She first began practicing art in high school, eventually completing a master of fine arts degree at State University of New York at Binghamton. She took her first photograph of street art in the early ’70s, as a student traveling through Europe. After school, Ms. Weisler, a Bronx native, returned to New York City and relocated to Greenwich Village, where she lives with her husband, an executive recruiter. Now in her early 50s, Ms. Weisler remains captivated by the vitality of graffiti. “There’s an energy there that just leaps out from the wall,” she said. “During the last decade, there has been a tremendous surge in the breadth and beauty of street art.”As the photographer, Ms. Weisler does not add to or modify what she sees. Instead, she searches through the vast urban territory and myriad spaces looking for the figures, motifs, and colors that can become independent images. While some of Ms. Weisler’s compositions capture the gestural marks of the anonymous graffiti artist, others, such as “Cherry Heart” (2008) and “Rida Scar” (2008), emphasize the fractured surfaces. Often Ms. Weisler isolates tiny elements, which take on new significance when photographically enlarged. “There’s a secretive nature to my photographs,” Ms. Weisler said. “I am capturing forms you may not notice when walking by a wall covered with graffiti.”And if you don’t notice the scenes before Ms. Weisler shoots them, you may only be able to see them in her photographs. The spaces she captures tend to change quickly — and not just because graffiti is continually added to the sites. Former hot spots for street art have been eliminated as derelict buildings in the East Village, SoHo, and TriBeCa have been torn down and the spaces developed. Traditional locations — such as 11 Spring St. in NoLIta, which was once caked with graffiti and poster art created by artists from around the world — can quickly become luxury condominiums. “Even the outlying areas of New York have been affected — places that I usually travel to look at street art, like Williamsburg and Coney Island,” Ms. Weisler said.While she appreciates the advances of urban renewal, the city’s new pristine surfaces leave her nostalgic for the color. “A city that has street art is one that is creatively vibrant,” Ms. Weisler said. “It allows almost anyone direct contact with art.”

Seeing Street Art Through the Camera

Seeing Street Art Through the Camera

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