It has been quite a few years since I first ventured down to the Wynwood section of Miami. I think that I first went there in 2015 and was shocked by what I found. I has first started photographing graffiti in Philadelphia in the late 1980’s. At the time, working as a neonatologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, it was harder for me to travel, as I was intent at building my medical career, so I began looking around for things to photograph nearer to home, especially on a quiet weekend morning. While many people looked at the street graffiti in the city as a horrible urban blight, I was impressed that there was a distinct beauty to these scrawls. Many of the graffiti writers not only wanted to see their work or their name on a wall, but they were also interested in presenting their writing with a real flair or sense of beauty, and it was this element that first attracted me to the walls in Philadelphia. Much of the street art was found in the impoverished areas of the city, or in the school yards. Inspired in part by the work of Aaron Siskind, I began experimenting by photographing the wall art close up, finding that upon enlarging these photos, they resembled abstract modern art, most closely the work of the Abstract Expressionists of the 50’s and 60’s. This work appealed to me a great deal, and I persisted in doing it to the present time. I even had a couple of group shows that exhibited some of my photo abstract work while we lived in that region.
When we moved to Florida, I had thought that my graffiti days were probably over, but a Google search revealed an area of Miami, Wynwood, in which many of the buildings actually had street artists invited to decorate the buildings, many of which at the time were abandoned warehouses. I took a ride down there one Sunday and it was pretty much of a ghost town, but the walls were absolutely spectacular. There was not only graffiti scrawls, but some of the most beautiful street art that I had ever seen. I have now been back to Wynwood several dozen times. I had to take a break during the recent Covid epidemic, but finally made it back there this past weekend. Since I first went there, Wynwood has been “discovered,” and the place has changed quite a bit. The abandoned warehouses have been replaced by highrises, restaurants, and shops, which have changed the environment quite a bit, but the street art has grown dramatically and is even more beautiful and interesting than was originally the case. In photographing the other day, I was most attracted to a few walls of pure abstraction, rather than the dramatic objective art, and my photos reflect that. A couple walls especially occupied most of my time there, and I made dozens of photos, several of which appeal to me a great deal. I will be back there again sometime soon to make more images, since all the art has changed in the two and a half years that I was away. But it is great to have Wynwood relatively nearby as a source for some of my non-landscape work.
