Chances are, you may not know who Tony Smyrski is, but there’s a greater chance you’ve come across one local media product or another he’s had an involvement with. Along with pal Dan Murphy, Smyrski’s co-publishes Megawords, and also works with Free News Projects and Swindle. But their latest project is a book called Public Wall Writing In Philadelphia, a photo anthology that chronicles Philly’s golden age of early graffiti and street style. This is Rizzo’s Philly we’re talking about here, with the city looking the exact same kind of banged-up it is in Rocky and Blow Out. Hard to believe it, but when you look at these pictures, you miss the grit. Not that there’s not plenty of it still here, but it does drive home just how much of a magical and weird place Philly used to be, and how incumbent it is upon us, what with all this “New Philadelphia”/Sixth Borough nonsense, to preserve that vibe. It may have been shady and ancient, but it was our shady and ancient. And PWWIP captures that perfectly.
After the jump, we corner Tony and quiz him on the book.
So Tony: This book, Public Wall Writing In Philadelphia, probably couldn’t have come at better time. Between so much talk about the “New Philadelphia” juxtaposed against the release of Rocky (not to mention a banner year in old-style Philly corruption), it’s only natural to want to look back at how Philly used to be. What was the most striking thing for you when you came across these photographs?
In the process of choosing these photos, from literally the thousands of photographs that we went through, the thing that struck me was how much and how little the landscape of Philadelphia has changed. Next to that would be the clothing and fashion that people were wearing, and how the perception of what makes up certain stereotypes was often complety different, or just flat out wrong.
Where’d these photos come from?
The majority of the photos were pulled from the Temple University Urban Archives, many from a professor called Roman Cybriwsky, a few random contributors, and some were our own. It’s all credited in the book of course.
What was the inspiration for the book?
We talked about making this book for a long time before actually starting on it, and it we went through many, many different ideas. At one point we wanted to create graffiti typography book, that didn’t focus at all on Philadelphia. Finally we decided didn’t want to do was make a history book, or some sort of taxonomy of of graffiti writing. We didn’t want to catalog specific dates, style, times, people and locations; but instead to present a collection of photographs that we found interesting, and that created a picture of certain time period in philadelphia, and to capture the zeitgeist of that period focused around wall writing.
I remember that period pretty well, actually. We’re talking early ’80s, in my case, and literally every kid I knew in Fishtown wrote on walls and listened to Power99. There’s a lot of overlap with early hip-hop here. Who were the big writers that popped out when you started going through these photos?
Duck stuck out to me, just because he’s been around for so long. I’m too young to remember many of the people that show up in the book, a lot of the photos are from the mid to late ’70s.
Have you heard from or tried to reach any of the people pictured in the book, or do you think these are just characters that are lost to time?
We haven’t searched for anyone specifically. We also don’t want to go and bring the past up to someone who may very well not be interested. I think that if someone who was in the book saw it, and wanted to talk to us badly enough, they would make themselves known. That brings up another point for me, if you don’t mind: A big part of this for us, is that in no way are we the “authors” of this book, or in anyway “authorities” on the subject. We just wanted to take the role of “enablers” you could say, we wanted to move the right material and images into the right format, and distribute it to the right people.
And who are “the right people?”
Its a wide range, the widest being Citizens of Philadelphia in general. Graffiti writers past and present of course. Artists and photographers. People interested in the Philadelphia history and urban history as a whole. I also think there is something in it for those that study urban culture, fashion and lifestyle. We’ve got something for everyone.
For sure. OK, last question, that I think you’re already kind of getting at: What’s the takeaway here? What do you think that the folks in this book knew about the City that we might not, or have forgotten? Because I look at some of these photos, and I get the sense that they’re trying to tell us something really important.
That my friend, is a very complex question. I’ll try to make as short a work of it as I can. And of course, I can only give my opinion. For me its not so much as if the people you see know something that we don’t. It’s that they are asking questions, they are doing something, anything, and expressing their emotions through their activities. Be those emotions fear, anger or hope, I’m not sure. A mix of those and more I’d wager. Their expression and declaration of self, or declaration of existence, is what is important. We are in a time now, with our personal freedoms at stake in many ways, where we are constantly overwhelmed by advertising and messages that our not our own. It may have never been more important to remember to ask those questions, and make as much noise of your own as possible.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 5:18 pm.