the colors of southie

It's been snowing all day today, but yesterday was beautiful and sunny, so I walked around my neighborhood taking photos for color and texture inspiration.

To say Southie is a neighborhood in transition is an understatement... the street our apartment is on is actually the last residential street before the blocks and blocks of empty lots, industrial warehouses and abandoned buildings that separates Southie from the seaport district and commercial docks. But in the other direction are dozens of multi-million dollar condominiums going up. Until recently, the only other building on our block was a dilapidated blue brick garage, though it was bulldozed last summer to make room for more luxury condos. There is an interesting juxtaposition between these new buildings and the vast stretches of industrial equipment, vacant warehouses, construction, trash and graffiti that sits literally alongside them.

It's something I know some people really don't like... I was walking to my car and heard a neighbor calling the building management to complain about the fact that there was graffiti on the side of another building visible from our parking lot. Personally the dilapidated emptiness was something I liked when we first found our apartment, and I am so intrigued by street art, graffiti and their place in the process of urban landscape aging.

The art vs. vandalism argument that surrounds graffiti is fascinating to me, and has been made even more interesting now that graffiti by Banksy and Shephard Fairey sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What determines whether paint on walls is a cultural masterpiece or nuisance? Why is a "Banksy" worth thousands while a "Bremner" mandates six months of jail time on Riker's Island?  Just some thoughts I had while trekking around snapping these :)