This pivot analyzes the historical emergence of legal graffiti and how it has led to a new ethos among writers. Examining how contemporary graffiti writing has been brought into new relationships with major social institutions, it explores the contemporary dynamics between graffiti, society, the art world and social media, paying particular attention to how New York City’s political elite has reacted to graffiti. Despite its major structural transformation, officials in New York continue to construe graffiti writing culture as a monolithic, criminal enterprise, a harbinger of economic and civic collapse. This basic paradox – persistent state opposition to legal forms of graffiti that continue to gain social acceptance – is found in many other major cities throughout the globe, especially those that have embraced neoliberal forms of governance. The author accounts for the cultural conflicts that graffiti consistently engenders by theorizing the political and economic advantages that elites secure by endorsing strong 'anti-graffiti' positions.

In recent years, the number of conflicts related to the misuse of street art and graffiti has been on the rise around the world. Some cases involve claims of misappropriation related to corporate advertising campaigns, while others entail the destruction or 'surgical' removal of street art from the walls on which they were created. In this work, Enrico Bonadio brings together a group of experts to provide the first comprehensive analysis of issues related to copyright in street art and graffiti. Chapter authors shed light not only on the legal tools available in thirteen key jurisdictions for street and graffiti artists to object to unauthorized exploitations and unwanted treatments of their works, but also offer policy and sociological insights designed to spur further debate on whether and to what extent the street art and graffiti subcultures can benefit from copyright and moral rights protection.

This book explores how copyright laws are perceived within street art and graffiti subcultures to examine how artists and writers view certain creative aspects of their own practice. Drawing on ethnographic research and fieldwork, the book gives voice to the main actors of these communities and highlights their feelings and opinions toward issues that are increasingly impacting their everyday life and work. It also touches on related and complementary issues, such as the 'gallerisation' or economic exploitation of these forms of art and the curious similarities between the graffiti and advertising worlds. Unique and comprehensive, Copyright on the Street brings the 'voice from the street' into the debate over the legal and non-legal protection of street art and graffiti.

This innovative introductory textbook to the growing field of cultural criminology examines the importance of understanding the cultural contexts in which crime and crime control take place. It describes and discusses the field's theoretical and methodological foundations, its links to other theoretical traditions, and its limits and criticisms. By exploring substantive areas such as crime in popular culture, deviance and social control, criminal justice and punishment, it demonstrates the utility of sometimes complex theory to core issues in criminology. Written in accessible language, this is the first text written specifically for a student audience, making it essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate modules on cultural criminology. Moreover, as it evaluates the connections of cultural criminology with wider theoretical developments, it will be ideal for broader courses on criminology, criminological theory and critical criminology. Finally, it will be of interest to anyone analysing contemporary issues and debates through a cultural lens.

"Graffiti is by nature a protean art. In movies, it is often the backdrop used to create a sense of danger and lawlessness. In bathroom stalls, it is the disembodied expression of gossip, lewdness, or confession. In protests, it is a resistive tool, visually displaying the cacophony of disparate voices and interests that come together to make up a movement. Every graffito has an unstable afterlife-fated to be added to, transformed, overlaid, photographed, reinterpreted, or painted over. In short, as this book artfully explains, graffiti makes for messy politics. It brings the unwieldiness of the crises it engages to the fore, giving shape to a conflict's evolving nature. The book closely examines the many permutations of graffiti in conflict zones-moving from the protest graffiti of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the Arab Spring in Egypt to the tourist attraction murals on the Israeli Separation Wall, to the street art used for city rebranding and beautification in Detroit and post-Katrina New Orleans. Graffiti has played a crucial role in the revolutionary movements of these locales, but has also been variously appropriated, policed, and exported, ushering in postconflict consumerism, gentrification, militarization, and anaesthetized forgetting. Yet, the book concludes, as protest movements change and adapt in turn, graffiti is also uniquely suited to shapeshift with them, opening up new apertures of resistance with every wave"--

The Black Star Collection at The Image Centre: the expectations, challenges, and results of a decade of research in a key photo agency’s print collection. In 2005, Toronto Metropolitan (formerly Ryerson) University (TMU) acquired the massive collection Black Star Collection of the photo agency previously based in New York City—nearly 292,000 black-and-white prints. Preserved at The Image Centre at TMU, the images include iconic stills of the American Civil Rights movement by Charles Moore, among thousands of ordinary photographs that were classified by theme in the agency’s picture library. While the move of the collection from a corporate photo agency to a public cultural institution enables more access, researchers must still face the size of the collection, its structural organization, the materiality of the prints, and the lack of ephemera. Facing Black Star aims to fruitfully highlight this tension between research expectations and challenges. Coeditors Thierry Gervais and Vincent Lavoie have gathered local, national, and international researchers ranging from graduate students to established scholars and curators to illuminate the staggering range of the collection, from its disquieting record of the Nazis’ rise to power to its visual archive of climate change. Each contribution highlights methodological, epistemological, and political issues inherent to conducting research in photographic archives and collections, such as indexing protocols and their impact on research, the photographic archive as a place of visibility and invisibility, and the photographic archive as a hermeneutic tool. Shedding new light on current issues in the theory and history of photography, this impressive volume containing 100 images will not only discuss the subjects portrayed in the photographs but will also address the history of photojournalism, the role of such a photographic archive in our Western societies, and ultimately photography as a medium. Like the other volumes of the RIC Books series (MIT Press/The Image Centre [formerly the Ryerson Image Centre]), this publication will appeal as much to academics of visual history as it will to photography enthusiasts in general.

Governance and Public Space in the Australian City is a rich and evocative examination of the production and use of public spaces in Australian cities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Using Brisbane as a case study, it demonstrates the way public spaces were constructed, contested, and controlled in attempts to create ‘ideal’ city spaces. This construction of space is considered not just in the literal and material sense but also as a product of aspirational and imaginative processes of city-building by municipal authorities and citizens. This book is as much about people as it is about cities – uncovering the manner in which perceived models of ideal urban citizenship were reflected in the production and ordering of city spaces. This book challenges common narratives that situate public spaces as universal or equalising aspects of the urban sphere. Exploring three distinct types of public space – the streets, slums, and parks – the book questions how urban spaces functioned, alongside how they were intended to function. In so doing, Governance and Public Space in the Australian City situates public spaces as products of manipulation and regulation at odds with broader concepts of individual liberty and the ‘rights’ of people to public space. It will be illuminating reading for scholars and students of urban history and Australian history.