Graffiti is one of those things that evolves over time in a city. When you see a graffiti wall, you know that there are layers of paint below it that express that city’s ever-changing reality.

My friend Cassidy Curtis has been in awe of this phenomenon for ages and he put together a fantastic website entitled “Graffiti Archaeology” to allow us to navigate a city wall over time. He’s been photographing walls and collecting images over time to compile these composites. Plus, now that it’s hit the web, different artists are starting to donate graffiti images to him. [If you have graffiti archives, definitely send them his way!]

I really like this project because it takes advantage of the digital medium’s ability to see temporal data in any order. Thus, you can see how the different graffiti elements have impacted new drawings, have been repurposed, or have been obliterated.