I still remember the first time I saw graffiti. I was probably five or six years old. My grandparents lived in a housing development in a small town in Michigan called Colonial Acres. My grandmother would take my brother and I for walks around a nearby pond when we weren’t too busy arguing over ownership of our Star Wars figures. One day, we got to the far side of the pond, and there was a small drainage ditch that funneled water into the pond. Someone had scrawled the word OZZY in large black letters with spray paint, just as they appeared on Ozzy Osbourne’s early albums. I thought, “Who did this? Why did they do it?” My admiration for such a flagrant act of juvenile delinquency placed the author of those OZZY letters on a high pedestal in my mind. From that point on, I had an appreciation for phrases that were carved on school desks, bathroom walls, and picnic tables. Phrases like FUCK YOU or SLAYER RULZ or I LOVE PUSSY are classics.

When I moved to New York City in 1998, graffiti seemed to be everywhere and I was fascinated. I used to carry a pager and would return beeps on pay phones; I would see PEZ tags on almost all of them. I also rode my bike around Manhattan and it seemed PEZ had tagged every pole you could chain a bike to, not to mention every stairwell in every building. I learned PEZ was a bike messenger, and I later met him when I was working on “Pedal,” my first documentary feature film. He was instrumental in helping me meet popular writers, like SACER and EARSNOT of IRAK, early on and that definitely helped get other writers interested in the project. I would contact writers through referrals, or they would call me because they were not into giving out their phone numbers and they would say, “Yo, who else you got flicks of?” I’d drop some names and, usually, it was on.

I began photographing graffiti writers and having them sign the prints because I wanted to do something that had never been done. I want these photographs to put a name to a face, or at least a name to an actual person, since most of the writers are covering their faces. The people I photographed want the fame but they can’t come right out and say, “Here I am,” because what they do is illegal.

It’s funny. A lot of the writers used reverse psychology on me and it worked. If they acted like they didn’t want to be photographed, it made me want that photo that much more. I was like Pookie taking hits of crack in New Jack City; I just wanted more, More, MORE! REVS was hard to get. He is the reigning champ/grand poo-bah/emperor of N.Y.C. graffiti. His roller pieces dominate spots—there could be fifty fill-ins on a wall but the huge R, E, V, and S will crush them all. He uses bucket paint and a roller with a long stick so his name is always bigger and shines brighter than the others. He also has amazing work in the subway tunnels—on all of the lines. I would wonder how much time he had spent underground, and how he was able to do that much without getting caught. Then I’d be out in Jersey and see a roller under a bridge and think, “Damn! Dude was here too!”

I had photographed someone who knew REVS and was able to make the introduction. A year went by, and I was standing in front of Supreme when I got a call. “So, you’re doing this book or what?” the voice said. I was probably waiting for calls from ten other writers at the time, but I knew who it was without an introduction. It was REVS! We spoke for about twenty minutes and then the phone cut out. He called me back three months later, and it was on! I took his photo, he signed it, and offered to write the text for Autograf. It was surreal. He is one of my favorite living artists so you can imagine how I felt.

I wanted each photo to be a true collaboration between myself and the writer, so I gave the subjects a lot of input into picking the location and I left it up to them to decide how much of their identity they wanted to reveal. I also composed the shots with the space for a tag in mind. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to meet with the writers whose names I would see on the streets of N.Y.C. every day. I was honored to collaborate with them on Autograf.

—Peter Sutherland
New York City, March 2004