by Tyson Schmidt

with contributions from

Christine McCarthy

& Askew One

subsist press31 fairview avefeilding 4702

http://erasure-subsist.tumblr.com

first published 2013(c) subsist press

contributions are copyright of the individual authors

isbn 978-0-472-25030-0

all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of subsist press and/or the individual contributors. a cip catalogue record for this book is available from the national library of new zealand.

contents

images 1 to 9.......4

interlude one.......13christine mccarthy

images 10 to 18.....27

interlude two.......36askew one

images 19 to 27.....45

conclude............54

4

bunnythorpe 11 march 2012

9.41 am

feilding 21 april 2012

12.24 pm

6

gisborne4 june 2012

11.42 am

woodville10 march 2012

1.49 pm

8

feilding7 january 2012

9.22 am

whanganui10 february 2012

2.19 pm

10

foxton23 january 2012

1.38 pm

taihape20 november 2011

12.10 pm

12

marton29 april 2012

3.25 pm

interlude one

14

It is five years today that Pihema Cameron wrote something far more dangerous than he could have ever imagined. Armed with an aerosol can, rather than a pen, he embellished Bruce William Emery’s Manurewa garage door in paint of an unspecified colour.[1] It was an incident that reminds that to write is to dare to challenge boundaries of ownership, of territories, of rights, and to upset the spatial conventions of private and public realms. That “bit of paint” resulted in Emery chasing Cameron 365m down Mahia Road, armed with a 14cm knife.[2]

Tagging punctures the thin boundary between private property and public space, challenging simplistic notions of ownership and spatial discretion, reconceptualising property “in terms of use rather than ownership.”[3] As “the practice of spray-painting or writing names, initials, nicknames, or coded identities in a stylised nature,”[4] tagging embodies the

“bad” writing; problem “art”by christine mccarthy 26 January 2013

“It’s not great but it’s just a bit of paint, man. Just paint over it. It’s not a big deal.”

New Zealand Herald (13 December 2008)

complexities of signature (as evidence of artistic authorship, legal agreement, identity, and ownership). As Stewart notes:

“graffiti are considered a threat not only to the surface upon which they are applied, but also to the entire system of meanings by which such surfaces acquire value, integrity, and significance ... Graffiti make claims upon materiality, refusing to accept the air as the only free or ambiguously defined space.”[5]

Graffiti also embellishes. It decorates in a way that is received as confrontational, as the writer disgraces notions of exclusive property and an owner’s right to control and determine their front yard décor. It was, for Annette King, Labour Cabinet Minister (and promoter of the 2008 Summary Offences (Tagging and Graffiti Vandalism) Amendment Act), “an invasion of private and public property that is intimidating and antisocial.”[6] The public outcry following Pihema’s death by fatal stabbing forgot a child had been killed and amplified the injury of graffiti, signalling the entrenched feelings of entitlement which property ownership brings with it.[7]

16

In contrast Stewart locates graffiti as an ethical response to blankness, with other commentators referring to the graffiti writer’s perspective of a blank wall as one of potential,[8] and graffiti as protesting against “corporatisation,”[9] or, as Stewart interprets:

“the “emptiness” or lack of signification characteristic ... of public and corporate architecture overall. To these buildings characterized by height and anonymity, the graffiti writer attaches the personal name written by hand on a scale perceptible to the individual viewer. In this sense, the graffiti writer argues for the personalization of wall writing and for the appropriation of the street by those who primarily inhabit it.”[10]

Notions of personalisation and identity, ideas which gained intimate currency in Victorian domestic discourse and etiquette,[11] now infringe urban and public streetscapes. The erasure of graffiti by local councils is hence also a retrieval of the city as a phenomenon of anonymity and a denial that for some home is the street. As Rowe and Hutton observe: “[m]aking a mark on urban cityscapes was noted as especially important for marginalized groups such as young homeless people.”[12]

The paint deployed by local councils to eradicate graffiti and return urban surfaces to some City Beautiful utopia[13] becomes physically and ideologically stuck to the tagging beneath, as council paint is unable to be simply extracted from the palimpsest of graffiti layers: “with new work responding to the work beneath it with transformed meanings and partial erasures.”[14] Lachmann also refers to “the unintended effect [when authorities removed graffiti, creating more blank space,] of spurring artistic innovation and drawing new cohorts of writers into the subways. Full [rail] car murals [he notes] were first created after a spasm of subway cleaning in the early 1970s.”[15] As Dovey et al similarly observe: “[e]rasures play a key role here - they stimulate both new work and a higher quality of work that will not be quickly erased. Inevitably all work is erased in time. Graffiti finds a place in those parts of our cities where identities and practices are open and unfinished.”[16]

18

This book, Erasure, presents photographs of the strategic reintroduction of blankness into the, sometimes mundane, sometimes obscure, geometries of paint, co-opted as a mechanism to suppress - perhaps even suffocate - graffiti, while promoting itself as an agent of remediation. The act of erasure becomes celebrated and amplified as paint brush and aerosol go head to head; the resulting abstract and nihilistic paint-patches float, as clouds and rectangles, proudly drawn with a crudeness of execution.

In Feilding (7 January 2012 9.22am), a picnic table foregrounds the sunny sky of a concrete block wall, the crisp whiteness of erasure floats cloud-like. The monochromy of black and white photography forces the projection of desired colours; an expansive panorama of cornflour blue embroidered with bleach-white cartoon clouds. The niggling tail of graffiti past fray the edge of cumulus as an illogical precipitation. The surreal roof garden of Carlos de Beistegui’s Champs Élysées apartment - perhaps even the final scene of the Truman Show, or Magritte’s 1933 La Condition Humaine - comes to mind. The evocation of satire and surrealism is perhaps

not so strange in this depiction of the banal industrialism (the crude concrete block wall, the air-conditioning unit, the non-descript picnic table) contextualising brightly laundered graffiti.

In contrast the geometric units of concrete block building are used to constrain graffiti in Marton (6 January 2012 6.07pm). Asserting the legitimacy of the unpainted block wall, this floating tetris tile is seemingly oblivious to the flawed logic of applied paint as a mechanism of removal. In Foxton (23 January 2012 1.30am) the rectangular panacea echoes the proportioning system of a window on the same wall; the heavy application of white “neutralising” the graffiti by perpetrating modernist ideas which claimed “the status of a natural finish for white and off-white tones.”[17] This neutral palette fakes invisibility and purity. Its power of being seen to be absent allows these paint-patches to both ideologically dissolve into the wall and to be a deliberate exhibition of punishment, demonstrating the

20

reassertion of order and the act which achieves it; ensuring that “[g]raffiti vandals will be deprived of the reward and satisfaction of recognition.”[18] Tainted with associations of hygiene, whiteness is “a surveillance device”[19] amplifying the presence of “dirt,” and “[t]he mark of purity,” which Le Corbusier credited with an ability to “reorganize the moral fabric of the entire city.”[20] Its use to whitewash graffiti-ed idiosyncrasy away as a moral action, conflates urban morality with the impersonal and culturally-specific discretions of ownership and unforgiving territory lines. The harsh white oblong abuts a less puritanical ghost of graffiti past. The photographic record obscures whether the trace that lingers is a scoured surface or a cover-up.[21] Regardless it outlines a morose face emerging from the concrete block grey. Together they provide a lesson in graffiti obliteration.

The suspended shapes oddly reiterate the colour-field paintings of Mark Rothko, which emerged in the late 1940s, pre-dating, by a decade, “autograph graffiti.”[22]

A large rectangle wriggles sideways along Miramar (28 January 2012 4.45pm). Cherishing corrugated iron, the obscuring paint clings to the vertical rhythm. Soft alternations of light and shade cause the graffiti cover to shimmer, and the stifled graffiti to writhe underneath. I can imagine standing frontal to its brutality, experiencing - as Crow did of Rothko’s No. 14 - a “mesmerizing field of shifting tone and density, a brush mark stand[ing] briefly apart from its enveloping matrix ... [its] feathery border ... its edges ... revealing the prosaic reality of its making.”[23] The reverberation between Rothko’s proximate fields of colour though are replaced here by another depth - the surface and its beneath: the oscillation between cover and emergent delinquent.

The textured surface of building also shapes graffiti remediation in Waipawa (4 September 2011 11.43 am), but here graffiti has successfully been silenced. Too geometrically-aspirational to be cloud-like, yet unable to be seriously platonic, the painted perimeter waivers, pinned down by protruding bricks. It is this persistent, but microbic movement, and

22

the degrees of chromatic difference and similarity between wall and painted punishment, that reinforce a comparison with Rothko’s work. Attempts for precision fail, as the awkward instrument of a house paint brush tends to the wobbly line and the fraying edge. These patchwork pieces exude an amateurism, a cheapness, and an odd colour mismatching with their newly acquired background, cognisant of DIY leftovers from a backyard shed or a tight council budget.

More thrifty attempts of eradication cover and embellish graffiti, imitating the miscreant letters in a seemingly pointless amplification of the devil to be erased. In Palmerston North (20 April 2012 9.21 am) a row of garage doorframes lend an air of propriety, compositionally controlling overwritten aerosol words. Pound has observed, that “[t]he frame is a ... sign of “depictivity,” a sign we are seeing not the world, but a depiction of the world. For the world is not framed, nor are things in it.”[24] The frame is hence a signal of unreality, containment and isolation of that which allegedly cannot disturb the real world’s order. In contradiction to more conventional assumptions of the architectural frame as

opening, these frames close and quarantine graffiti, limiting its extent, perhaps allowing a more liberal inscription of obliteration. Wellington City (14 May 2011 11.37 am) equally enjoys the perversion framing tolerates. Snail trail-like remnants crawl detached from legibility; the sense of the original text eradiated. The frame stands proud recording the subsecive anatomical fragments of aerosol text; wayward serifs, stems, ascenders, and descenders.

Collectively these black and white images are not innocent bystanders to eradication. They are composed and deliberate observations which commemorate the punishment of graffiti as a worthy pictorial subject through the seductive nature of black and white photography, and the eye of the architecturally-trained, enticed as much by the play of light on corrugated iron silos as it is by council-endorsed graffitification. Within each caption’s pretence of objective and precise accounting, stopping shy of GPS co-ordinates, there is a forensic beauty; the aftermath of tragedy.

24

Silence and suffocation and absence are the traces that life has gone. The oppressive nature of the opaque rectangle of paint, the clown-frightening potential of fluffy white clouds, and over-writing as a betrayal of authorship, is the violence of the censor, which is a violence disproportionate to any notional violation associated with the writing of urban graffiti texts. It is a power which ultimately controls public spaces conventionally coined as democratic, and the power which determined that a year after Pihema Cameron was killed “[l]ife goes on as normal in Manurewa’s Mahia Rd, with one exception - the noticeable lack of graffiti.”[25]

[1] The accounts differ regarding whether or not Emery’s garage door was actually grafitti-ed: “the pair were about to tag a fence when a man with a knife chased them” (Vass, Beck “A life for the sake of a tag: 15-year-old becomes latest victim of violence on streets” New Zealand Herald (Monday 28 Janury 2008) p. A1.), ““while he [Emery] was out on his front deck he saw two persons with hoodies on spray-painting his garage door”” (Chris Comeskey, Emery’s lawyer, quoted in Vass, Beck “Tagger-case defendent to undergo mental test” New Zealand Herald (Friday 1 February 2008) p. A3.)

[2] Koubaridis, Andrew, Beck Vass, Chris Barton and Phil Taylor “The day Bruce Emery saw red” New Zealand Herald (13 December 2008) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10547883 [3] Rowe, Michael and Fiona Hutton ““Is your city pretty anyway?” Perspectives on graffiti and the urban landscape” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology (2012) 45: 66-86, p.80.

[4] des Forges, Michaela “Marking Space and Making Place: geographies of graffiti in Wellington, New Zealand” (Wellington: Victoria University MA (Geography) thesis, 2011), p.21. Also: ““Tags” are a graphic signature written as a very fast and simple way to get a name onto a surface with a primary content of “I was here.” “Throw-ups” are enlarged versions of a tag, generally take longer to complete but are performed rather than finished images ... The “piece” is a larger-scale, complex and time-consuming work often involving multiple colours and complex graphic design. The design of a piece is often the name of the writer but stylized until it is almost illegible to non-writers ... tags slide into throw-ups which slide into pieces.” Dovey, Kim, Simon Wollan and Ian Woodcock “Placing Graffiti: Creating and Contesting Character in Inner-city Melbourne” Journal of Urban

Design (February 2012) 17(1):21-41, pp.23-25.[5] Stewart, Susan Crime of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 216-217.[6] King, Annette “Third Reading: Summary Offences (Tagging and Graffiti Vandalism) Amend-ment Bill” (20 June 2008) http://www.beehive.govt.nz/node/33691 [7] An example was: “Christchurch City councillor Barry Corbett, who implied that the man charged with Pihema’s murder should be set free. He said: “If I was on the jury, I’d let him get away with it, but that’s just me.”” Binning, Elizabeth “Mother: Tagging wrong but my son didn’t deserve to die” New Zealand Herald (5 February 2008) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10490683. See also Rowe & Hutton, p.70.[8] Dovey et al, p.23; Rowe & Hutton, p.67.[9] Rowe & Hutton, p.78.

[10] Stewart pp. 218-219. Rowe and Hutton refer to an understanding among “genuine” writers that graffiti-ing some sites is inappropriate. Those mentioned include: churches, private property, schools, cars, and marae. Rowe & Hutton, pp.73, 80.[11] Jennings, Jan “Controlling Passion: the turn-of-the-century wallpaper dilemma” Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture (Winter 1996) 31(4):243-264, pp. 243, 260.

26

[12] Rowe & Hutton, p. 67. See also Moreau and Alderman who note that opposition to graffiti is thus “marked by insensitivity to the interests of those who do not own property or a business.” (Moreau, Terri and Derek H. Alderman “Graffiti Hurts and the Eradication of Alternative Land-scape Expression” The Geographical Review (January 2011) 101(1):106-124, p.116).[13] The City Beautiful movement of the early twentieth-century promoted design as a mecha-nism of ensuring civic order and morality. c.f. “the desires to impose an image of the clean city ... imagined into existence through the construction of graffiti as disorder in the urban environ-ment.” (McAuliffe, Cameron “Graffiti or Street Art? Negotiating the Moral Geographies of the Creative City” Journal of Urban Affairs (2012) 34(2):189-206, p.192.)[14] Dovey et al, p.30.[15] Lachmann, Richard “Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City [Book Review]” American Journal of Sociology (July 2002) 108(1): 244-245, p.244. Likewise Halsey and Young note that “graffiti writers experience blank urban walls as unfinished spaces of potential.” Halsey & Young paraphrased, Dovey et al, p.23.[16] Dovey et al, pp.39-40. American anti-graffiti-ists “Graffiti Hurts” similarly assert that: “[r]emoving graffiti by painting new random square blocks provides graffitit writers with a new, bright canvas.” Instead they promote mural painting “to “cover a wall plagued with graffiti”.” Graf-fiti Hurts quoted, Moreau & Alderman, pp.117, 118.[17] Braham, William “A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colors in Modern Architecture” Journal of Architectural Education (September 1999) 53(1):4-14, p.5.[18] Freeman, Fay “How to STOP Graffiti Guide: A practical resource for territorial authori-ties, schools, businesses and private residents” (Wellington: Crime Prevention Unit, Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice, c2008) http://justice.govt.nz/policy/crime-prevention/documents/vandalism/STOP-Graffiti-Guide-LR.pdf, p.8.[19] Wigley, Mark White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Mas-sachusetts: MIT Press, 1995), p.xxii.[20] Wigley, p.xvi.[21] Freeman notes that when using chemicals to remove graffiti, “some substances may create a shadow or ghosting effect on certain surfaces when graffiti is removed.” Freeman, p.9.[22] Stewart, p.224.[23] Crow, Thomas “The Marginal Difference in Rothko’s Abstraction” Seeing Rothko ed Glen Phillips and Thomas Crow (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005): 25-39, p.26.[24] Pound, Francis Frames on the Land: Early Landscape Painting in New Zealand (Auckland: Collins, 1983), p.13.[25] Donovan, Brooke “Neighbourhood killing marks an end to graffiti” New Zealand Herald (13 December 2008) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10547878

masterton26 may 2011

3.07 pm

28

feilding13 february 2012

2.35 pm

marton6 january 2012

6.07 pm

30

gisborne3 june 2011

3.51 pm

miramar28 january 2012

4.45 pm

32

napier4 february 2012

6.58 pm

palmerston north18 july 2012

9.47 am

34

wellington city14 may 2011

11.37 am

masterton26 may 2011

3.08 pm

interlude two

37

It’s the start of November and we are now officially one Auckland – the Supercity is now in effect. Taking the train or walking around the city and seeing the mis-coloured patches of buff where the writers names used to be certainly feels like a funeral for me – plenty of iconic spots have been cleaned and the city is feeling somewhat a mere shadow of it’s vibrant past already.

The other morning I woke up and went to my front door to check the mail only to discover that either an Auckland City Council contractor or local good Samaritan had done me the ‘service’ of removing the tags from my front doorway. Now, I felt (very) mildly upset about having a couple of tags in my doorway but I actually felt completely pissed off about them being removed.

Stepping outside I immediately noticed what a shocking job this person had done. The paint had been applied so thickly with a well-used roller that it was textured, meaning I would have to sand it back.

buff this:the irony of “the graffiti industry”by askew one originally published at askew1.com on 2.11.2010

It didn’t cover the tag properly, it was shining through and they had dripped paint all over the tiles on the ground. It was the wrong tone of white, the wrong type of paint…the list goes on.

It needs to be said – what Auckland City Council’s Zero-Tolerance policy has become is something less about ‘Getting On With Keeping Our Streets Tidy’ and more about the eradication of ‘Name Based Fame’ (as Rob Shields has referred to it in the media). The determination to remove graffiti comes at the cost of doing that ‘tidily’. It is not uncommon to see badly painted rectangles in a mismatched paint colour for example or even bigger walls buffed with an airless sprayer, perhaps with little regard for the amount of overspray on other nearby surfaces. In my opinion, most graffiti removal does little to improve the environment aesthetically – it only obscures the tags and often it fails to do that successfully.

None the less, this graffiti removal service plays a major role in the council’s Zero Tolerance work flow – the contractors painting out graffiti are the eyes of the council, each equipped with a digital camera so they can document the

39

tags they paint out. Those photos are sorted into the graffiti data base according to the distinguishable names – the collective hours attributed to the removal of each unique name is tallied and from that, the supposed total cost of that individuals damages is ascertained. If said individual is ever caught or identified by the police/council they may be sued for the supposed amount owing in civil costs, like the current case that has been getting a bit of media exposure lately. [http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10664273] They falsely state that this is the first such incident of the council pursuing civil damages from those that have been caught doing graffiti. They have been doing this actively since 2002.

All of the ‘Groundhog Day’ type media around ‘Auckland’s Graffiti Problem’ and the ‘Millions’ spent on its removal got me wondering how bad is it really?

Now I may be completely insane having spent all this time pondering and even going to the extent of trying to do some maths to work out what the actual costs may be. I’m obviously not privy to the actual facts and figures other than what is published on the Internet, so this

is speculative at best. What I have sought to do though is offer an alternative outlook on this issue.

Considering one litre of paint covers 15 square metres of surface area – then one ten-litre bucket covers 150 square metres. To be fair, some tags will need two coats to be removed properly, so let’s say that from each ten-litre bucket you get 75 square metres coverage. A ten-litre bucket generally costs between $90.00 – $140.00 retail – for the sake of being balanced in this discussion, let’s say an average of $115.00. So let’s say the average tag is roughly 50cm x 20cm, that means there is around 10 tags to every square metre. $115.00 divided by 75 is $1.53 – divide that by 10 and you have 15.3 cents per tag – that’s with two coats!

According to the article since July 2008 graffiti has been removed from 146,000 sites around Auckland that’s roughly 73,000 tags per year. 73,000 multiplied by 0.153 equals $11,169.00.

That must mean that the annual figures are mostly attributed to labour costs of the graffiti removal? I don’t know what the average city contractor or graffiti removal person gets paid

41

although I have been told it’s around $16.00 per hour. According to a survey of wage rates published in December 2009 it was found that the average hourly wage in NZ is around $25.39 – so lets just use that figure. Now, I’ve watched a city contractor pull up and paint out a tag – it took less than 5 minutes. 5 minutes is one 12th of an hour, $25.39 divided by 12 equals $2.11.

If you take that $2.11 and multiply it 73,000 times you get $154,030.00. Take that and add the $11,169.00 from before and you get $165,199.00.

When applying this amount to the current case reported in the news article above, that is $2.26 multiplied 551 times, we end up with an amount of $1,246.00 – a far cry from the $33,000.00 the 21 year old has been sued in civil damages. In fact based on my (highly speculative) calculations they are billing this guy for one fifth of the annual total.

Of course this is only one scenario – there are plenty of variables, for instance the use of Graffiti Guard products, which allow paint to be removed with a high-pressure water blaster etc.

Regardless though, would it be fair to say that the raw expense of graffiti removal is not costing ratepayers millions per year but rather the industry and administration around graffiti removal is? Think about it:

The rental, manning and administration of the 0800 stop tags number.

Supplying of digital cameras for contractors.

The cost of set up and maintaining the council database, including the man-hours expended in identifying particular tags and sorting thousands of photos into the appropriate folders.

The salaries of any council staff employed specifically to deal with this issue.

The hiring of various Private Investigation firms to trail and assist in identifying taggers of interest.

The design and production of ‘educational’ pamphlets and propaganda plus the cost of distribution of those items into schools and other facilities that deal with youth.

The hiring of ‘Graffiti Education’ officers who work in schools and educational facilities discouraging young people from engaging in graffiti.

43

Here’s my personal take: Graffiti to me is a huge industry – one that ironically benefits a lot of people other than the graffiti writers themselves. Graffiti is also an incredible leveraging tool in local and national level politics – used to appease voters, because being ‘seen’ removing graffiti is a powerful way to project the impression that things are being done.

Anti-graffiti Legislation (Tagging and Graffiti Vandalism Bill) has some implications for everyone as more discretionary powers for Police and council were bolstered in 2008 allowing them to profile and prosecute graffiti writers in ways that go against some basic rights. Those caught doing graffiti are often given punishment that is considered ‘making an example’ of them so to deter others from doing similar things. Often this punishment can be disproportionate to the actual level of criminality or maliciousness of the act itself. This is purely due to the emotive nature of the issue and how it is considered by the public, reported on by the media and leveraged by the politicians.

Again, graffiti is an industry – one that creates livelihood for a number of people and drives a certain sector of our economy. The war on graffiti isn’t necessarily what it is promoted to be by the council and media because perhaps a city without graffiti isn’t actually in the financial interests of certain parties.

On the issue of graffiti I feel that Auckland lacks a certain maturity in its vision of what constitutes a great city. I’ve been lucky enough to visit some of what I would consider the greatest cities of the world, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Melbourne…

Many more cities I haven’t visited yet but in general there are 3 features that make these places truly vibrant in my eyes. They are very multicultural, have a great public transport system and visually they reflect the people that live there – this includes the extent of the graffiti. I realise my world view differs greatly from a vast number of people here in Auckland though.

waipawa4 september 2011

11.43 am

46

waikanae13 july 2012

4.36 pm

whanganui10 february 2012

2.16 pm

48

wellington city14 may 2011

11.49 am

palmerston north20 april 2012

9.21 am

50

marton29 april 2012

3.22 pm

napier5 february 2012

10.22 am

52

whanganui10 february 2012

2.15 pm

palmerston north18 july 2012

9.48 am

54

conclude

The town I live in prides itself on being beautiful. A sign announces how many times it has been annointed the most beautiful, alongside another that tells you the town is friendly. In my town graffiti is seen as ugly and unfriendly, the complete opposite of what the town wants to be.

You might say that the erasure of graffiti from the walls is like the application of make-up to a face. Beauty is restored. The offending blemish is covered. You can feel comfortable about smilng again, being friendly to those who see you. They know that the blemish is there, that the covering is not restoring the surface to its original

56

state. They know you care enough to cover it up though. They know you care enough to not accept the blemish as part of the beauty and friendliness you want to project.

I’m not a photographer, but I do carry a camera almost everywhere. There’s not a lot of hunting required to find erased graffiti. It does take a good amount of seeing though - despite the obviousness of the cover-ups the human brain seems to encourage the ignoring of these erasures. I can’t decide whether my brain is telling me that the cover-up is acceptable or that it doesn’t exist. Surely I’m not in denial, so I must be subconciously accepting.

The 27 images are all from the lower North Island. Small towns like Woodville and Waipawa, to bigger centres like Napier and Wellington. No matter what size the town, the approach to erasure seems the same. The urgency to cover-up takes precedence over the time required to match the original colour or material scheme.

Maybe in 10 years time I’ll revisit all these spots and see if additional layers have been added. Perhaps layers will be weathered off. Perhaps beautiful and friendly will mean different things and a different approach to erasure will be employed.

58 [THE END]