Art began as graffiti. Humanity began its love affair with art by making the walls of caves into great expanses of mural. It was long before the written word, long before the concept of property, when the mural, the painting, and the non-verbal "I was here" graffiti scrawl had not yet parted ways.

But it has been eons hence. We live now in civilized societies. Concepts such as rights and property have served to define our ability to annoy and cheat each other, but also serve to hamper in the instinctual urge to scrawl. To paint a picture or write a word at will on something that the would-be artist does not own has been defined as its own class of act -- as "graffiti".

It should come as no surprise that this act -- deemed unacceptable by the terms of modern society -- should survive best amongst those whose regard for modern society is not high. The resulting graffiti is often found in places where the eyes and muscle of that society are not often found: under bridges, on the sides of old warehouses, on anything abandoned that's nailed down.

The most intriguing forms of graffiti, in my view, are the messages scrawled on the sides of railcars. These words don't just get painted for all to see, they move. A phrase painted today in Seattle might be read in North Platte, Nebraska a week later; mobile messages, like strange cries in the dark, or messages in a bottle set adrift on the sea. Who do their creators hope to speak to? Sometimes these creations are walls of colorful spray-paint, and sometimes they are but small, haiku-like scraps of text. They are sometimes cryptic, sometimes lewd, sometimes political commentaries of various levels of sophistication. It is rare, however, to find an instance of graffiti that does not have some message attached to it. Communication? Or is this some form of venting, of public therapy, of urinating on the world that civilized society has created?

Such graffiti has been the subject of photographers in the past, and this has not come without controversy. Many find graffiti to be objectionable at its very core, an affront to the values of civilized society. Still others admire some of the wit and cleverness that can be found, but simply cannot come to full ease with photographing it, out of fear of glorifying something that is inherently illegal.

At the time that I shot most of the photos for Beautifying the Rails, I had no clear idea of where I stood on this matter. I knew only that there was a long tradition of messages scrawled onto railcars, and that I wanted to document that. But in the wake of producing these images, I became more and more entangled in the philosophical issues that arose in photographing -- and perhaps glorifying -- something that was patently illegal.

In the process of chewing over the matter, I began a dialogue with two fellow photographers, Jeff Bass of Costa Mesa, CA, and Scott Lothes. Jeff is a particularly well-rounded photographer who had done some notable photos in the past of what he terms "boxcar art". Scott at the time was living on the island of Hokkaido, in Japan, and was shooting a long series of photos highlighting what he called "man-made Japan" -- the under-photographed landscape of less-than-idyllic, man-made concrete engineering monstrosities. Along with each image in this series, I've placed excerpts from interviews with Jeff and Scott.

For myself, I have no answers still. Graffiti -- like it or not, legal or not -- is part of the landscape of modern America. Certainly, I could shun it, turn my shoulder on it as an unacceptable part of modern society that ought to be scrubbed out and painted over. How honest, though, is that? The journalist in me decries that as lying, as idealizing, as showing only that which is beautiful or politically correct.

Graffiti is there. It is a part of my world. I observe and record that world. Therefore I observe and record that graffiti too. That may not be the strongest ground to stand on, but it's all I have right now to make sense of what I see.

Technical Matters:

Beautifying the Rails was created as a finals project for a traditional photography course I took at Portland Community College in 2006. The "original" body of work takes the form of a hand bound, 12.1 x 16.25 inch book. There is no text beyond the captions, which are preserved here with each plate. Because this represents a digital version of a pre-existing, cohesive body of work, all the images used in the book are displayed. The aim of the book was to an audience with no knowledge of railroads or the world of grafitti, so while most images concentrate on teh grafitti itself, some "back away" for the sake of context.

All of the images in this series were shot on 35mm Ilford HP5 Plus ISO 400 film, using a Nikon FM-10. Lens choices vary from photo to photo, but the bulk were shot with a Tamron 19-35 f/3.5-4.5. I processed each of the rolls myself by hand, then printed them traditionally onto Ilford Multigrade IVRC Pearl Deluxe paper. The thirteen prints measure 9.0 x 5.5 inches. For this web presentation, each was scanned using an Epson 1250 flatbed scanner, with final adjustments made in Photoshop Elements 3.0. No digital adjustments were made to image color or exposure.

~Alexander B. Craghead