During the “bad old days” of 1970s New York City, some viewed the graffiti-covered subway cars as a blight symbolizing the crumbling, crime-ridden city. But while the MTA waged war against kids armed with spray paint, Henry Chalfant would rush to the elevated stations in the Bronx to document tagged cars before they could be buffed clean.
“I always thought of it as art,” said Chalfant. “Somebody [would] say, ‘Yes, but it’s vandalism,’ and I couldn’t say it wasn’t vandalism, but you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. It has its value as art and it always has.”
Originally a sculptor, Chalfant spent a decade photographing and filming graffiti artists and their works as the paint-covered train cars made their way from the outer boroughs and in through Manhattan. The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ new exhibition, Henry Chalfant: Art vs Transit, 1977-1987 is the first retrospective of his work to be shown in New York City.
In the gallery, dozens of framed photos of tagged subway cars line the walls, each image spliced together from several shots that Chalfant would snap on his 50mm camera while sprinting down subway platforms.
“I would wait till it stopped, and then stand up beside the front of the car and go bang and then jump, run 15 feet and bang until I did four or five,” said Chalfant.
Off to the side of the gallery is another room simulating the experience of being on one of those tagged cars. Recordings of trains rumbling along the tracks are piped into a space filled with mock-ups of subway cars. Chalfant’s photographs are blown up to life-sized proportions, with wild-style tags, bubble letters and leering skulls as big as they were before the crackdowns of the late ‘80s and ‘90s. One former graffiti artist, a Coney Islander who goes by the name Bes 7, said it feels like a blessing to see photos of graffiti thrown up by people he knew shown on the walls of a museum.
“Back then, we weren't allowed to take too much pictures because we was scared we'd get caught,” he said. “It was evidence.”
Bes 7 said he and his friends were also too worried about getting arrested (or electrocuted by the third rail) to take time to document their work. Luckily, Chalfant was able to archive some of the tags through his photographs and his work on films like the iconic documentary Style Wars, to preserve a history of New York City that officials eventually erased.
Listen to Danny Lewis discuss the exhibit on WNYC:
Henry Chalfant: Art vs Transit, 1977-1987 is on display at the Bronx Museum of the Arts [1040 Grand Concourse] through March 2020.
