Houston Street Graffiti Wall

This graffiti wall on Houston Street, just off of the Bowery, appears to be officially sanctioned, and perhaps even a single work of art.  It’s not clear, but part of the wall is behind a fence while the rest is open to the street, but all of it has the same style writing in a single color – red.  It seems unlikely that such unity would have come about organically, without some organizing force behind it.  Nevertheless, I suppose anything is possible, and perhaps a single artist tagged part of the wall in this style, and the next person came by and mimicked what he or she saw, then another, and another, and so on.

And, yes, that’s my shadow stretching out from the foreground.  There seems to be a tradition of such shots, and I do not think I have done one before now.  I actually wish the shadow were not there. I did not notice it when I first set up, but even then I realized there was no way to avoid it. I could come back at a different time of day and lose the light, or shift the perspective of the photo and lose the shot.  So here it is.  It partially kills the deserted street effect I like so much.

This was shot in the early morning, looking west down Houston street.  I did a basic HDR process in Photomatix, then a variety of filters in both Photomatix and OnOne software, including one of the Brian Matiash HDR presets. The original result out of the HDR processing came out a bit grainy, and noise reduction did not have much of an effect, so I decided to roll with it and actually added to the graininess with one of the Film Effect filters in the Nik suite.