Subway Art
Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant
Chronicle Books

A few months back, I took my parents on a trip to Manhattan. I work there, so it wasn’t a big deal for this bridge and tunneler, but for my parents—who have not been to New York City in almost 25 years—the trip was a culture shock.

See, my mom and dad remember a very different New York. One teeming with prostitutes, drug dealers, grime, and graffiti. Watching my mom step foot on a subway in the evening to go from City Hall to 42nd Street, it was difficult to ignore that she was clutching her purse a little closer to her chest and eyeballing the homeless person in the corner. In the 15 years I’ve been going to New York on my own, I’ve never been robbed, assaulted, or even harassed. They don’t know this New York.

The Manhattan they know is the one from Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s “Subway Art,” a photo retrospective of the early New York street art scene. This is the 25th anniversary for the book and it’s been reissued in a large format with a new intro and more pictures. The two photojournalists were entrenched in the underground art movement, meandering around train yards and dilapidated buildings to capture artists like SEEN and DAZE in the middle of the night.

The photos are vintage New York—dirty alleys and ugly subway cars adorned with breathtaking colorful artwork and massive bombings. It’s still mind boggling, in this day of graffiti-proof subways, that so much paint could be applied to public transportation. It’s also shocking that so much quality art trumped gang signs and scratchy tags.

The best part of the book, however, is not the art or the scenes of a chaotic New York, but the portraits of the artists as young men. You get a wonderful look into the eyes of kids who just wanted to express themselves. These are not criminals or monsters, but bored youth trying to get their voice across in a visual manner. These are kids my parents were scared of, and the ironic thing is, many of these kids are now legends.