Wall story : an eleven year visual record of a street art site in Sydney

The ephemerality of wall art offers the opportunity to follow interwoven stories by recording the evolution of particular sites over a period of time. Indeed, by taking a methodologically planned approach to the longitudinal photodocumentation of chosen sites, an as yet small number of researchers have been able to draw conclusions about, for instance, the positive impact of graffiti (Andron, 2013), the effects of social media on graffiti's aesthetic features (MacDowall, 2016), and the existence of ‘conversations’ that take place between walls, artists, writers, and the wider community (Hansen & Flynn, 2015; Hale, 2018). In a small series of photographs taken on six days between 2008 and 2019, I have recorded stages in the transformation of markings on part of an inner suburban wall in Sydney, from stencil art, through tags and other forms of graffiti, to the present-day large scale artwork. My study differs from those cited above in that the longest of these lasted 500 days (MacDowell, 2016), whereas my series covered a period of eleven years. However another significant difference is that my photographs were not taken with any methodical regularity. Instead I took them whenever I saw that there had been a noticeable change, thus missing some of the more subtle modifications to the wall over time. This means that I could not analyse short term ‘conversations’ in the way that the other researchers have done.