The Faith of Graffiti

Norman Mailer & Jon Naar 

Hardcover | 23.8 x 1.7 x 31 cm | 125 pp

Lebowski | 2009 | 9789048802760

Rare & Collectible

In 1973, author Norman Mailer teamed with photographer Jon Naar to produce The Faith of Graffiti, a fearless exploration of the birth of the street art movement in New York City. The book coupled Mailer's essay on the origins and importance of graffiti in
modern urban culture with Naar's radiant, arresting photographs of the young graffiti writers' work. The result was a powerful, impressionistic account of artistic ferment on the streets of a troubled and changing city - and an iconic documentary record of a critical body of work now largely lost to history.

This new edition brings this vibrant seminal document on the origins of street art to contemporary readers. Photographer Jon Naar has enhanced the original with thirty-two pages of additional photographs that are new to this edition, along with an afterword in which he reflects on the project and the meaning it has taken on in the intervening decades. It stands now, as it did then, as a rich survey of a group of outsider artists and the body work they created - and a provocative defence of a generation that questioned the bounds of authority over aesthetics.

Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was one of the most important American voices of the twentieth century-a journalist, essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, film director, and public intellectual. 

Jon Naar is an internationally acclaimed documentary and fine art photographer and author.  

"The Faith is the bible of graffiti. It forever captures the place, the time, and the writings of those of us who made it happen." Snake I

"To see beauty in the subways, to make a gorgeous book out of urban ugliness - an art book no less - seems fantastic. And yet here [is] The Faith of Graffiti. ... The light of New York City, the gray, yellow daylight, streams off these pages." New York Times Book Review, 1974

"The Faith of Graffiti is a magical book with a magical title. It marked the first time that adults examined the now global movement of graffiti on its own term - bearing witness to an art form exploding into existence for the first time in human history, by kids, for kids. The magic is not only that this book got there first but that Naar and Mailer got it so right." Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon, authors of The History of American Graffiti