Street Art: ‘Tags’ Are Not Just for Your Luggage

I record frequently, but almost never ‘tag’ like these street artists who make it their mission to spread their art.

For me, the inspiration to travel and appreciate a world outside my own comes from many places, one of them being the movies I watch. On a recent evening holed up in my room, I watched the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. The film follows an idiosyncratic man, Thierry Guetta, as he documents prolific graffiti artists across multiple countries for over a decade. The film took me on a ride from Los Angeles to Paris to London and beyond while telling Thierry’s story of being transformed by this form of art. With each palm-sized sticker or massive poster pasted onto a billboard or public-facing wall, these artists leave their mark on the cities. They run the streets at night, tagging while carefully (and sometimes unsuccessfully) dodging the police. When the sun rises, people take notice of the new additions to the scenery on their daily commute.

As shown in Exit Through the Gift Shop, each city contextualizes a different society. And with it comes a different daily audience to be exposed to one version of street art before more stickers or tags overwrite it. In this temporal art form, Thierry Guetta developed his own style of expression, taking to the streets not just as a novice filmmaker, but also as a street artist.

Within the first ten minutes of the documentary, I recognized the work of an artist called Space Invader from a photo I snapped of a building in Paris. I wondered how many more works of art were hiding in the background of my photos. As I kept watching, I began to think about how we leave our mark on the places we travel. Surely traveling leaves an impression on us, as captured by our reactions to the photographs we take or our delight in the foods we try. But more than that, I hope that traveling asks something from us too.

As I continued to watch the documentary, I felt a strange connection to Thierry, a man who recorded every moment of his life on a video camera that almost never left his hands. While living in Japan, I was guilty of taking almost 6,000 photos over the course of nine weeks. I had taken a thorough record of my times abroad, not willing to relinquish the physical proof of my experiences. Rarely, however, do I feel that this give and take relationship runs both ways. I record frequently, but almost never ‘tag’ like these street artists who make it their mission to spread their art. Instead, perhaps the marks I leave on my travel destinations reside in the hearts and minds of the people I interact with, and in the memories that live behind the photos I take.

Article written by Marina Kaneko.