François Chastanet

Name writing in public space is the dominant practice of graffiti since the end of the 20th century. This popular practice most likely represents the only calligraphic school with any weight in the Western cultural reality, where, in the opening 21st century, we currently live in a keyboard civilization. Talking about these illegal inscriptions at an aesthetic level is always complex; it is then important to dispassionately analyzing it. My own approach proposes to study tagging from a formal perspective, as geographically rooted calligraphic schools it actually is: replacing the art of urban signature in the larger history of (Latin) letterforms and identifying metropolitan-based specific handstyles. We have to recognize that different traditions of stylized writing with their own tools, styles and methodologies are coexisting: graffiti as contextual design challenging local urban infrastructures and cultures.

The New York’s graffiti movement, that started in the mid-1960s and became the epicenter of graffiti visual globalization in its spreading in the early 1990s, is of course very important but is actually hiding a more complex situation. There is a historical dispute between Philadelphia and New York to know which city first started this “all-city” graffiti of names game in the late 1960s. To my point of view, documenting how these handstyles stabilized overtime as clearly distinct styles is more important than strict chronological issues. The New York phenomenon became massive in the 1970s and 1980s and beneficiated of a high media coverage, creating the global archetypes that would predominantly define the urban signature until this day.

My residency research focused on Philadelphia that is to the contrary a highly autarkic and unique scene that deserves much greater recognition, an impressive, localized instance of an urban signature “school” within the inner limits of the city’s metropolitan area, a handcrafted visual identity that has remained stable over the years despite some evolutions.

For the Villa Albertine, through direct immersion and exploration, I deepened the Philadelphia case study in an American graffiti cartography: creation of a photo and video corpus on these exceptional urban signatures in order to highlight this under-represented phenomenon. Philly handstyles were initially called “Gangster Prints” in the 1960s and later developed into numerous variants. I investigated the inner Philadelphia development in letter shapes, notably what is called in the local graff milieu the condensed and cursive “Tall Hands” and the extraordinary “Wickeds” (very elaborated wildstyle signatures that developed since the 1980s) with their associated punchlines in clean legible uppercases. These different practices are relatively unknown and represent underrated jewels in street penmanship.

The Philadelphia tagging scene constitutes a genuine example of the emergence of metropolitan collective identities based on letterforms: some cities are able to produce their own scriptural “texture” beyond the individual experiments on the image of the name. The Philadelphia “hands” deserves an in depth photographic and calligraphic study in order to pursue the work engaged by few independent researchers, designers and artists (notably Stephen Powers, Robert Moran, Christian Acker). As the anthropologist Susan Phillips proposes in “The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti” (Yale University Press, 2021), we should read urban infrastructures and city spaces as texts or archives.

Beyond photographing signatures in interaction with the Philadelphian urban landscape, I parallelly conducted interviews with local “writers” and hand sessions on paper video recorded from the scribe’s viewpoint for an optimal gestural rendering. The complementary use of various drawing observations (architectural diagrams, calligraphic gestural details, lettering models) permits to didactically show the human body as a writing tool and to bring further understanding about the local raw aesthetics of skeletal letterforms in public space.