“Graffiti was like a school for so many young people that actually kept them from getting involved in more serious criminal activity, and was actually a way in which they learned to dedicate themselves to something, to seriously master a technique and an art form and to enter into the wider world in which as marginal young people from the barrios of the city would never have done otherwise ... You know there's a whole bunch of artists who have careers in Europe from here; where they don't have one here.”

~ Henry Chalfant

By Catzie Vilayphonh  |  Send to Friend

One would never expect a co-producer of two of the most definitive works of early hip-hop to have once been a Classical Greek scholar, an established sculptor, or in the very least bit a white guy pushing 40. But once the idea of watching and recording what was going on outside of his window got into Henry Chalfant's head, it turned into a life-long career of photography and filmmaking: observing people and culture -- from the old school to the new, from the tall buildings to the underground subway trains, from the streets of the Bronx to the banks of Palestine. Interestingly enough for Chalfant, that was the real art.

I caught up with Henry while he was in town as a guest of the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design at Drexel to talk about his early career catching the ephemeral world that was graffiti subway art.


Catz: Explain to me why a Stanford University graduate who majored in Classical Greek sculpture, somehow ended up making one of the most definitive works depicting graffiti art in hip-hop, the film Style Wars and also the book Subway Art.

Henry: I guess there’s all kinds of reasons -- social, psychological, that would have lead me to that from back in the University days. It was Greek literature that I majored in, and I also had an interest in Greek culture because of my travels in Greece and southern Italy. Part of my interest in classical antiquity was coming from an anthropological point of view, too. Flash forward, I’m a sculptor for a number of years and I move to New York. It was in a period of conceptual art and Minimalism (it was very powerful in the '70s in New York), and I was doing something more Modernist. Direct carving in stone, biomorphic forms, found objects and things like that would inspire me to carve a shape, which was already passé in New York. Somebody would call up the foundry and order six plaques of copper or a certain cut of paving stone and have that delivered to the gallery, and that was it. That was the involvement of the artist, and that was not of interest to me. At the same time (this was 1973 or '75), I was watching what was evolving on the trains, which was as a visual experience more interesting to me than the conceptual art that I was looking at in the galleries, and I started taking pictures just for fun. But that snowballed because I took a lot of pictures and than eventually I met graffiti writers and once I did that then the whole ethnographic thing became of interest to me.

Catz: Do you ever think about what your life would be like if you had stayed as a sculptor, if you hadn’t gone this route?

Henry: I do, and I think the life of a studio artist is a solitary one, and my personality tends to that, so that it would have been a much narrower life if I had continued in that way. Sort of a life saving thing was the [instinct] to go and do something which engaged me in the world, even though that wasn’t my natural inclination, it was probably good for me. In fact it was, and has opened up my life considerably.

Catz: Are people often surprised by the way you look? Do you get a lot of “What does this white guy know about hip-hop”? Because when you started, a lot of the kids who were writing graffiti were just kids and the authorities that they were rebelling against --

Henry: Looked like me.

Catz: Right, so do you get that a lot, people asking you "What is your interest? What’s your motive?"

Henry: It went from [being] directly suspicious of me: “Is this guy a cop?" or if I would go visit a writer in a project in the Bronx, and riding up on the elevator, one of the residents would say “Are you a priest?” or "Are you a C.O.?", because that’s the only white people they knew, so I did get that a lot.

Catz: So you’ve basically documented graffiti and in essence, hip-hop, when it first started. You know these graffiti writers were seen not as artists but as kids that were vandalizing property and delinquents. But now a lot of graffiti artists are treated like artists. They get their own galleries, they get commissioned to design toys, sneakers, products. What is your take on that?

Henry: The cops always said graffiti was an entry-level crime, that if you began writing graffiti, next you’d be stealing [and] you’d end up in prison. And it’s just not been true, it isn’t true at all. In fact graffiti was like a school for so many young people that actually kept them from getting involved in more serious criminal activity, and was actually a way in which they learned to dedicate themselves to something, to seriously master a technique and an art form and to enter into the wider world in which as marginal young people from the barrios of the city would never have done otherwise. It put them in touch with other people in other worlds, in fact now that it’s an international movement. You know there’s a whole bunch of artists who have careers in Europe from here; where they don’t have one here.

Catz: You’re not a graffiti writer yourself are you?

Henry: No, it’s the kind of thing you have to learn early, I was too old [laughs]. I was 40, and so it’s not something you pick up. And I tried. As a researcher, I had to go out to the yards with them and they very kindly did an outline for me and I was filling in. And it was dangerous and scary, and crawling over the third rail is not my idea of a good time. And controlling a spray can. My hat is off to graffiti writers because it’s extremely difficult, spray paint comes out at a certain rate and if you slow down it will start to drip. You just have to be very deliberate in your movements, it’s almost like a choreographed performance which you have to do with the can.

Catz: Which is more appealing to you: the act of wanting to paint itself, or the act of just wanting to be seen?

Henry: [laughs] It’s kind of hard to segue, but there’s SCHEME, who was a really good artist, and TNT -- the crew he was in -- wrote this little epigram on one of his pieces “TNT is every place … In your eyes and in your face." Now, 'in your face’ is pretty aggressive to an individual, or saying it to the public. And of course that’s part of the spirit of it, and a lot of people hate that. But I like that, I’m drawn to the sort of defiant and rebellious statement that is being made, and I especially like it in that instance because he’s an excellent wonderful artist, and the work that he did in a very short time, he took over in numbers a lot of the lines, and he also did so with great aesthetic prowess.

Catz: Tell me about Visit Palestine.

Henry: I went in 2000 with the Human rights organization MADRE, whose mission in the world is helping women and children who are victims of U.S. foreign policy. They go to places like Palestine and they have sister organizations with refugee camps. In this instance, the main one is Dheisheh in Bethlehem. They like to take delegations of people who support them and so we went to these places to know the human faces, what they’re doing and where the money is going. They’re wonderful trips because we went for 10 days and we met and interviewed many, many Palestinians and Israelis who have concerned themselves with peace and reconciliation and the occupation -- an Israeli like Dror Itkis, who knows all about this sort of infrastructure of the occupation which are these by-passed roads to the settlements, which are superhighways which Palestinians can’t get on and off of. And than Palestinians have their little roads and it takes them all day to get through checkpoints and all that stuff. So we got to see people like that. Then in the refugee camp there’s an organization called IBDAA Cultural Center. At that time we hung out with the kids, we rode with them in a van back into Israel to visit the remnants of the villages where their grandparents had been expelled from in 1948. This is quite emotional for the children, because they grew up in a refugee camp, that’s home. But you take them back there, and they see that they lived in this beautiful village that’s gone [except] a few walls and maybe a fruit tree which says it was there, out in the middle of the beautiful mountains and places like that which have become National Park in Israel. So they see where they lived, and where they can’t come back to. So that’s what Visit Palestine is. It’s kind of a report on that visit.

Catz: Are you familiar with the Philly style of graffiti, "Wicked", which is long, tall and stretchy?

Henry: To a small degree. Back in the '80s, I went around with Philly writers and they showed me "Wickeds" on rooftops and I met some writers. I got to know quite well Parish. I knew Baby Rock from New York and the Ballbuster Crew when he was down here and so they kind of took me around.

Catz: So now when you go around to different cities, can you recognize certain styles from certain cities and say "That’s definitely from San Francisco, or that’s definitely West Coast, and that’s definitely New York"?

Henry: That’s a very broad brush. If it’s really obvious I can tell, but there’s been so much cross-fertilization now and then layers of style. Like two years ago I was in Paris, and everybody was doing old school New York on the trains, which was kind of fun. It was kind of a flashback to Bronx 1979, but that was so self-conscious. That's what people do when they’re artists, they go back and forth and take things which are fresh. One thing about European style is that it went such the direction of technical expertise, that it was kind of like mannerism, which is kind of like the end of the Renaissance. It was too much. It becomes claustrophobic when it’s so technically perfect and advanced. So then people break out of that and go back to some earlier style which is like a breath of fresh air and in that sense you can say “Oh, when I went to Paris, oh that looks familiar, I know where that came from."

Catz: There’s sort of a new genre where people are just putting characters up, as opposed to writing their names, like FAFI and Os Gemeos. What do you think about that coming from an original sense of wanting to just write your name and having everybody know who you are versus drawing these little characters?

Henry: I like it. I like that graffiti has branched out, that there is such a category as Street Art, and that you don’t have to write just your name. And I understand that traditionalists believe the name is the basis of it and that should be it, but I think that it’s good that it go to another level. I think that it has a very important role as public art. The initial statement, “I’m getting up, that’s my name" is great as an initial statement. It was implicitly very, very political that people took over public space other people neglected and abandoned. Having said that I think after 30 years, yes, it’s good that people are using it to have some kind of narrative content -- to have characters or political satire, an ironic statement -- having a political statement like anti-war, anti-authoritarian or what ever it is. I think it’s great and I want to see more of it.