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Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire (see also mural).
Graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered by property owners and civic authorities as defacement and vandalism, which is a punishable crime, citing the use of graffiti by street gangs to mark territory or to serve as an indicator of gang-related activities. Graffiti has become visualized as a growing urban "problem" for many cities in industrialized nations, spreading from the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s to the rest of the United States and Europe and other world regions
"Graffiti" (usually both singular and plural) and the rare singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched"). The term "graffiti" is used in art history for works of art produced by scratching a design into a surface. A related term is "sgraffito", which involves scratching through one layer of pigment to reveal another beneath it. This technique was primarily used by potters who would glaze their wares and then scratch a design into them. In ancient times graffiti were carved on walls with a sharp object, although sometimes chalk or coal were used. The word originates from Greek γράφειν—graphein—meaning "to write".
The term graffiti originally referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, and such, found on the walls of ancient sepulchres or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Historically, these writings were not considered vanadlism, which today is considered part of the definition of graffiti.
The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.
Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are 40,000 year old ones found in Australia. The oldest written graffiti was found in ancient Rome around 2500 years ago. Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was not considered vandalism.
Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there. One reads:
Wet with cool dew drops
fragrant with perfume from the flowers
came the gentle breeze
jasmine and water lily
dance in the spring sunshine
side-long glances
of the golden-hued ladies
stab into my thoughts
heaven itself cannot take my mind
as it has been captivated by one lass
among the five hundred I have seen here.
Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.
Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.
There are also examples of graffiti occurring in American history, such as Independence Rock, a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.
Later, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt in the 1790s. Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, Greece.
The oldest known example of graffiti "monikers" found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.
In World War II, an inscription on a wall at the fortress of Verdun was seen as an illustration of the US response twice in a generation to the wrongs of the Old World:
During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".
Modern graffiti art has its origins with young people in 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti. Eventually, throw-ups and pieces evolved with the desire to create larger art. Writers used spray paint and other kind of materials to leave tags or to create images on the sides subway trains. and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.
While the art had many advocates and appreciators—including the cultural critic Norman Mailer—others, including New York City mayor Ed Koch, considered it to be defacement of public property, and saw it as a form of public blight. The ‘taggers’ called what they did ‘writing’—though an important 1974 essay by Mailer referred to it using the term ‘graffiti.’
Contemporary graffiti style has been heavily influenced by hip hop culture and the myriad international styles derived from Philadelphia and New York City Subway graffiti; however, there are many other traditions of notable graffiti in the twentieth century. Graffiti have long appeared on building walls, in latrines, railroad boxcars, subways, and bridges.
An early graffito outside of New York or Philadelphia was the inscription in London reading "Clapton is God" in reference to the guitarist Eric Clapton. Creating the cult of the guitar hero, the phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in an Islington, north London in the autumn of 1967. The graffito was captured in a photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall.
Films like Style Wars in the 80s depicting famous writers such as Skeme, Dondi, MinOne, and ZEPHYR reinforced graffiti's role within New York's emerging hip-hop culture. Although many officers of the New York City Police Department found this film to be controversial, Style Wars is still recognized as the most prolific film representation of what was going on within the young hip hop culture of the early 1980s. Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 took hip hop graffiti to Paris and London as part of the New York City Rap Tour in 1983
Commercialization and entrance into mainstream pop culture
Main article: Commercial graffiti
With the popularity and legitimization of graffiti has come a level of commercialization. In 2001, computer giant IBM launched an advertising campaign in Chicago and San Francisco which involved people spray painting on sidewalks a peace symbol, a heart, and a penguin (Linux mascot), to represent "Peace, Love, and Linux." IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco collectively US$120,000 for punitive damages and clean-up costs.
In 2005, a similar ad campaign was launched by Sony and executed by its advertising agency in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, to market its handheld PSP gaming system. In this campaign, taking notice of the legal problems of the IBM campaign, Sony paid building owners for the rights to paint on their buildings "a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle, or a rocking horse".
Tristan Manco wrote that Brazil "boasts a unique and particularly rich, graffiti scene ... [earning] it an international reputation as the place to go for artistic inspiration". Graffiti "flourishes in every conceivable space in Brazil's cities". Artistic parallels "are often drawn between the energy of São Paulo today and 1970s New York". The "sprawling metropolis", of São Paulo has "become the new shrine to graffiti"; Manco alludes to "poverty and unemployment ... [and] the epic struggles and conditions of the country's marginalised peoples", and to "Brazil's chronic poverty", as the main engines that "have fuelled a vibrant graffiti culture". In world terms, Brazil has "one of the most uneven distributions of income. Laws and taxes change frequently". Such factors, Manco argues, contribute to a very fluid society, riven with those economic divisions and social tensions that underpin and feed the "folkloric vandalism and an urban sport for the disenfranchised", that is South American graffiti art.
Prominent Brazilian writers include Os Gêmeos, Boleta, Nunca, Nina, Speto, Tikka, and T.Freak. Their artistic success and involvement in commercial design ventures has highlighted divisions within the Brazilian graffiti community between adherents of the cruder transgressive form of pichação and the more conventionally artistic values of the practitioners of grafite.
Graffiti in the Middle East has emerged slowly, with taggers operating in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf countries like Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and in Iran. The major Iranian newspaper Hamshahri has published two articles on illegal writers in the city with photographic coverage of Iranian artist A1one's works on Tehran walls. Tokyo-based design magazine, PingMag, has interviewed A1one and featured photographs of his work. The Israeli West Bank barrier has become a site for graffiti, reminiscent in this sense of the Berlin Wall. Many writers in Israel come from other places around the globe, such as JUIF from Los Angeles and DEVIONE from London. The religious reference "נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן" ("Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman") is commonly seen in graffiti around Israel.
Graffiti has played an important role within the street art scene in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially following the events of the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Sudanese Revolution of 2018/19. Graffiti is a tool of expression in the context of conflict in the region, allowing people to raise their voices politically and socially. Famous street artist Banksy has had an important effect in the street art scene in the MENA area, especially in Palestine where some of his works are located in the West Bank barrier and Bethlehem.
There are also a large number of graffiti influences in Southeast Asian countries that mostly come from modern Western culture, such as Malaysia, where graffiti have long been a common sight in Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Since 2010, the country has begun hosting a street festival to encourage all generations and people from all walks of life to enjoy and encourage Malaysian street culture.
The modern-day graffitists can be found with an arsenal of various materials that allow for a successful production of a piece. This includes such techniques as scribing. However, spray paint in aerosol cans is the number one medium for graffiti. From this commodity comes different styles, technique, and abilities to form master works of graffiti. Spray paint can be found at hardware and art stores and comes in virtually every color.
Stencil graffiti is created by cutting out shapes and designs in a stiff material (such as cardboard or subject folders) to form an overall design or image. The stencil is then placed on the "canvas" gently and with quick, easy strokes of the aerosol can, the image begins to appear on the intended surface.
Some of the first examples were created in 1981 by artists Blek le Rat in Paris, in 1982 by Jef Aerosol in Tours (France); by 1985 stencils had appeared in other cities including New York City, Sydney, and Melbourne, where they were documented by American photographer Charles Gatewood and Australian photographer Rennie Ellis
Tagging is the practice of someone spray-painting "their name, initial or logo onto a public surface" in a handstyle unique to the writer. Tags were the first form of modern graffiti.
Modern graffiti art often incorporates additional arts and technologies. For example, Graffiti Research Lab has encouraged the use of projected images and magnetic light-emitting diodes (throwies) as new media for graffitists. yarnbombing is another recent form of graffiti. Yarnbombers occasionally target previous graffiti for modification, which had been avoided among the majority of graffitists.
Theories on the use of graffiti by avant-garde artists have a history dating back at least to the Asger Jorn, who in 1962 painting declared in a graffiti-like gesture "the avant-garde won't give up"
Many contemporary analysts and even art critics have begun to see artistic value in some graffiti and to recognize it as a form of public art. According to many art researchers, particularly in the Netherlands and in Los Angeles, that type of public art is, in fact an effective tool of social emancipation or, in the achievement of a political goal
In times of conflict, such murals have offered a means of communication and self-expression for members of these socially, ethnically, or racially divided communities, and have proven themselves as effective tools in establishing dialog and thus, of addressing cleavages in the long run. The Berlin Wall was also extensively covered by graffiti reflecting social pressures relating to the oppressive Soviet rule over the GDR.
Many artists involved with graffiti are also concerned with the similar activity of stenciling. Essentially, this entails stenciling a print of one or more colors using spray-paint. Recognized while exhibiting and publishing several of her coloured stencils and paintings portraying the Sri Lankan Civil War and urban Britain in the early 2000s, graffitists Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., has also become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos for singles "Galang" and "Bucky Done Gun", and her cover art. Stickers of her artwork also often appear around places such as London in Brick Lane, stuck to lamp posts and street signs, she having become a muse for other graffitists and painters worldwide in cities including Seville.
Graffitist believes that art should be on display for everyone in the public eye or in plain sight, not hidden away in a museum or a gallery. Art should color the streets, not the inside of some building. Graffiti is a form of art that cannot be owned or bought. It does not last forever, it is temporary, yet one of a kind. It is a form of self promotion for the artist that can be displayed anywhere form sidewalks, roofs, subways, building wall, etc. Art to them is for everyone and should be showed to everyone for free.
Graffiti is a way of communicating and a way of expressing what one feels in the moment. It is both art and a functional thing that can warn people of something or inform people of something. However, graffiti is to some people a form of art, but to some a form of vandalism. And many graffitists choose to protect their identities and remain anonymous or to hinder prosecution.
With the commercialization of graffiti (and hip hop in general), in most cases, even with legally painted "graffiti" art, graffitists tend to choose anonymity. This may be attributed to various reasons or a combination of reasons. Graffiti still remains the one of four hip hop elements that is not considered "performance art" despite the image of the "singing and dancing star" that sells hip hop culture to the mainstream. Being a graphic form of art, it might also be said that many graffitists still fall in the category of the introverted archetypal artist.
Banksy is one of the world's most notorious and popular street artists who continues to remain faceless in today's society. He is known for his political, anti-war stencil art mainly in Bristol, England, but his work may be seen anywhere from Los Angeles to Palestine. In the UK, Banksy is the most recognizable icon for this cultural artistic movement and keeps his identity a secret to avoid arrest. Much of Banksy's artwork may be seen around the streets of London and surrounding suburbs, although he has painted pictures throughout the world, including the Middle East, where he has painted on Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side. One depicted a hole in the wall with an idyllic beach, while another shows a mountain landscape on the other side. A number of exhibitions also have taken place since 2000, and recent works of art have fetched vast sums of money. Banksy's art is a prime example of the classic controversy: vandalism vs. art. Art supporters endorse his work distributed in urban areas as pieces of art and some councils, such as Bristol and Islington, have officially protected them, while officials of other areas have deemed his work to be vandalism and have removed it.
Pixnit is another artist who chooses to keep her identity from the general public. Her work focuses on beauty and design aspects of graffiti as opposed to Banksy's anti-government shock value. Her paintings are often of flower designs above shops and stores in her local urban area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some store owners endorse her work and encourage others to do similar work as well. "One of the pieces was left up above Steve's Kitchen, because it looks pretty awesome"- Erin Scott, the manager of New England Comics in Allston, Massachusetts.
Graffiti artists may become offended if photographs of their art are published in a commercial context without their permission. In March 2020, the Finnish graffiti artist Psyke expressed his displeasure at the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat publishing a photograph of a Peugeot 208 in an article about new cars, with his graffiti prominently shown on the background. The artist claims he does not want his art being used in commercial context, not even if he were to receive compensation.
Territorial graffiti marks urban neighborhoods with tags and logos to differentiate certain groups from others. These images are meant to show outsiders a stern look at whose turf is whose. The subject matter of gang-related graffiti consists of cryptic symbols and initials strictly fashioned with unique calligraphies. Gang members use graffiti to designate membership throughout the gang, to differentiate rivals and associates and, most commonly, to mark borders which are both territorial and ideological.
Graffiti has been used as a means of advertising both legally and illegally. Bronx-based TATS CRU has made a name for themselves doing legal advertising campaigns for companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Toyota, and MTV. In the UK, Covent Garden's Boxfresh used stencil images of a Zapatista revolutionary in the hopes that cross referencing would promote their store.
Smirnoff hired artists to use reverse graffiti (the use of high pressure hoses to clean dirty surfaces to leave a clean image in the surrounding dirt) to increase awareness of their product.
Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist, and anti-consumerist messages throughout the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names such as "De Zoot", "Vendex", and "Dr Rat". To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started that was called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there was already a vibrant graffiti culture.
The student protests and general strike of May 1968 saw Paris bedecked in revolutionary, anarchistic, and situationist slogans such as L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire ("Boredom is counterrevolutionary") and Lisez moins, vivez plus ("Read less, live more"). While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the 'millenarian' and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers.
I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like. Excuse the French, we're not a bunch of p---- artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we're a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.
The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming, or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s with the rise of Street Art, a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints and non-traditional forms of painting.
Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicize other art forms, and have used the prison sentences enforced on them as a means of further protest. The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each other's practices. For example, the anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.
Berlin human rights activist Irmela Mensah-Schramm has received global media attention and numerous awards for her 35-year campaign of effacing neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist graffiti throughout Germany, often by altering hate speech in humorous ways.
In Serbian capital, Belgrade, the graffiti depicting a uniformed former general of Serb army and war criminal, convicted at ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnian War, Ratko Mladić, appeared in a military salute alongside the words "General, thank to your mother". Aleks Eror, Berlin-based journalist, explains how "veneration of historical and wartime figures" through street art is not a new phenomenon in the region of former Yugoslavia, and that "in most cases is firmly focused on the future, rather than retelling the past". Eror is not only analyst pointing to danger of such an expressions for the region's future. In a long expose on the subject of Bosnian genocide denial, at Balkan Diskurs magazine and multimedia platform website, Kristina Gadže and Taylor Whitsell referred to these experiences as a young generations' "cultural heritage", in which young are being exposed to celebration and affirmation of war-criminals as part of their "formal education" and "inheritance".
There are numerous examples of genocide denial through celebration and affirmation of war criminals throughout the region of Western Balkans inhabited by Serbs using this form of artistic expression. Several more of these graffiti are found in Serbian capital, and many more across Serbia and Bosnian and Herzegovinian administrative entity, Republika Srpska, which is the ethnic Serbian majority enclave. Critics point that Serbia as a state, is willing to defend the mural of convicted war criminal, and have no intention to react on cases of genocide denial, noting that Interior Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vulin decision to ban any gathering with an intent to remove the mural, with the deployment of riot police, sends the message of "tacit endorsement". Consequently, on 9 November 2021, Serbian heavy police in riot gear, with graffiti creators and their supporters, blocked the access to the mural to prevent human rights groups and other activists to paint over it and mark the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism in that way, and even arrested two civic activist for throwing eggs at the graffiti.
Graffiti may also be used as an offensive expression. This form of graffiti may be difficult to identify, as it is mostly removed by the local authority (as councils which have adopted strategies of criminalization also strive to remove graffiti quickly). Therefore, existing racist graffiti is mostly more subtle and at first sight, not easily recognized as "racist". It can then be understood only if one knows the relevant "local code" (social, historical, political, temporal, and spatial), which is seen as heteroglot and thus a 'unique set of conditions' in a cultural context.
A spatial code for example, could be that there is a certain youth group in an area that is engaging heavily in racist activities. So, for residents (knowing the local code), a graffiti containing only the name or abbreviation of this gang already is a racist expression, reminding the offended people of their gang activities. Also a graffiti is in most cases, the herald of more serious criminal activity to come. A person who does not know these gang activities would not be able to recognize the meaning of this graffiti. Also if a tag of this youth group or gang is placed on a building occupied by asylum seekers, for example, its racist character is even stronger.
By making the graffiti less explicit (as adapted to social and legal constraints), these drawings are less likely to be removed, but do not lose their threatening and offensive character.
Elsewhere, activists in Russia have used painted caricatures of local officials with their mouths as potholes, to show their anger about the poor state of the roads. In Manchester, England, a graffitists painted obscene images around potholes, which often resulted in them being repaired within 48 hours.
In the early 1980s, the first art galleries to show graffitists to the public were Fashion Moda in the Bronx, Now Gallery and Fun Gallery, both in the East Village, Manhattan.
A 2006 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum displayed graffiti as an art form that began in New York's outer boroughs and reached great heights in the early 1980s with the work of Crash, Lee, Daze, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It displayed 22 works by New York graffitists, including Crash, Daze, and Lady Pink. In an article about the exhibition in the magazine Time Out, curator Charlotta Kotik said that she hoped the exhibition would cause viewers to rethink their assumptions about graffiti.
From the 1970s onwards, Burhan Doğançay photographed urban walls all over the world; these he then archived for use as sources of inspiration for his painterly works. The project today known as "Walls of the World" grew beyond even his own expectations and comprises about 30,000 individual images. It spans a period of 40 years across five continents and 114 countries. In 1982, photographs from this project comprised a one-man exhibition titled "Les murs murmurent, ils crient, ils chantent ..." (The walls whisper, shout and sing ...) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
In Australia, art historians have judged some local graffiti of sufficient creative merit to rank them firmly within the arts. Oxford University Press's art history text Australian Painting 1788–2000 concludes with a long discussion of graffiti's key place within contemporary visual culture, including the work of several Australian practitioners.
Between March and April 2009, 150 artists exhibited 300 pieces of graffiti at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Spray paint has many negative environmental effects. The paint contains toxic chemicals, and the can uses volatile hydrocarbon gases to spray the paint onto a surface.
Volatile organic compound (VOC) leads to ground level ozone formation and most of graffiti related emissions are VOCs. A 2010 paper estimates 4,862 tons of VOCs were released in the United States in activities related to graffiti.
In China, Mao Zedong in the 1920s used revolutionary slogans and paintings in public places to galvanize the country's communist movement.
Based on different national conditions, many people believe that China's attitude towards Graffiti is fierce, but in fact, according to Lance Crayon in his film Spray Paint Beijing: Graffiti in the Capital of China, Graffiti is generally accepted in Beijing, with artists not seeing much police interference. Political and religiously sensitive graffiti, however, is not allowed.
In Hong Kong, Tsang Tsou Choi was known as the King of Kowloon for his calligraphy graffiti over many years, in which he claimed ownership of the area. Now some of his work is preserved officially.
In Taiwan, the government has made some concessions to graffitists. Since 2005 they have been allowed to freely display their work along some sections of riverside retaining walls in designated "Graffiti Zones". From 2007, Taipei's department of cultural affairs also began permitting graffiti on fences around major public construction sites. Department head Yong-ping Lee (李永萍) stated, "We will promote graffiti starting with the public sector, and then later in the private sector too. It's our goal to beautify the city with graffiti". The government later helped organize a graffiti contest in Ximending, a popular shopping district. graffitists caught working outside of these designated areas still face fines up to NT$6,000 under a department of environmental protection regulation. However, Taiwanese authorities can be relatively lenient, one veteran police officer stating anonymously, "Unless someone complains about vandalism, we won't get involved. We don't go after it proactively."
In 1993, after several expensive cars in Singapore were spray-painted, the police arrested a student from the Singapore American School, Michael P. Fay, questioned him, and subsequently charged him with vandalism. Fay pleaded guilty to vandalizing a car in addition to stealing road signs. Under the 1966 Vandalism Act of Singapore, originally passed to curb the spread of communist graffiti in Singapore, the court sentenced him to four months in jail, a fine of S$3,500 (US$2,233), and a caning. The New York Times ran several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called on the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy with protests. Although the Singapore government received many calls for clemency, Fay's caning took place in Singapore on 5 May 1994. Fay had originally received a sentence of six strokes of the cane, but the presiding president of Singapore, Ong Teng Cheong, agreed to reduce his caning sentence to four lashes.
In South Korea, Park Jung-soo was fined two million South Korean won by the Seoul Central District Court for spray-painting a rat on posters of the G-20 Summit a few days before the event in November 2011. Park alleged that the initial in "G-20" sounds like the Korean word for "rat", but Korean government prosecutors alleged that Park was making a derogatory statement about the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the host of the summit. This case led to public outcry and debate on the lack of government tolerance and in support of freedom of expression. The court ruled that the painting, "an ominous creature like a rat" amounts to "an organized criminal activity" and upheld the fine while denying the prosecution's request for imprisonment for Park.
In Europe, community cleaning squads have responded to graffiti, in some cases with reckless abandon, as when in 1992 in France a local Scout group, attempting to remove modern graffiti, damaged two prehistoric paintings of bison in the Cave of Mayrière supérieure near the French village of Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in archeology.
In September 2006, the European Parliament directed the European Commission to create urban environment policies to prevent and eliminate dirt, litter, graffiti, animal excrement, and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems in European cities, along with other concerns over urban life.
In Budapest, Hungary, both a city-backed movement called I Love Budapest and a special police division tackle the problem, including the provision of approved areas.
The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 became Britain's latest anti-graffiti legislation. In August 2004, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign issued a press release calling for zero tolerance of graffiti and supporting proposals such as issuing "on the spot" fines to graffiti offenders and banning the sale of aerosol paint to anyone under the age of 16. The press release also condemned the use of graffiti images in advertising and in music videos, arguing that real-world experience of graffiti stood far removed from its often-portrayed "cool" or "edgy'" image.
To back the campaign, 123 Members of Parliament (MPs) (including then Prime Minister Tony Blair), signed a charter which stated: "Graffiti is not art, it's crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of this problem."
In the UK, city councils have the power to take action against the owner of any property that has been defaced under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005) or, in certain cases, the Highways Act. This is often used against owners of property that are complacent in allowing protective boards to be defaced so long as the property is not damaged.
In July 2008, a conspiracy charge was used to convict graffitists for the first time. After a three-month police surveillance operation, nine members of the DPM crew were convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal damage costing at least £1 million. Five of them received prison sentences, ranging from eighteen months to two years. The unprecedented scale of the investigation and the severity of the sentences rekindled public debate over whether graffiti should be considered art or crime.
Some councils, like those of Stroud and Loerrach, provide approved areas in the town where graffitists can showcase their talents, including underpasses, car parks, and walls that might otherwise prove a target for the "spray and run".
Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney at Camperdown (2009)
In an effort to reduce vandalism, many cities in Australia have designated walls or areas exclusively for use by graffitists. One early example is the "Graffiti Tunnel" located at the Camperdown Campus of the University of Sydney, which is available for use by any student at the university to tag, advertise, poster, and paint. Advocates of this idea suggest that this discourages petty vandalism yet encourages artists to take their time and produce great art, without worry of being caught or arrested for vandalism or trespassing.[108][109] Others disagree with this approach, arguing that the presence of legal graffiti walls does not demonstrably reduce illegal graffiti elsewhere. Some local government areas throughout Australia have introduced "anti-graffiti squads", who clean graffiti in the area, and such crews as BCW (Buffers Can't Win) have taken steps to keep one step ahead of local graffiti cleaners.
Many state governments have banned the sale or possession of spray paint to those under the age of 18 (age of majority). However, a number of local governments in Victoria have taken steps to recognize the cultural heritage value of some examples of graffiti, such as prominent political graffiti. Tough new graffiti laws have been introduced in Australia with fines of up to A$26,000 and two years in prison.
Melbourne is a prominent graffiti city of Australia with many of its lanes being tourist attractions, such as Hosier Lane in particular, a popular destination for photographers, wedding photography, and backdrops for corporate print advertising. The Lonely Planet travel guide cites Melbourne's street as a major attraction. All forms of graffiti, including sticker art, poster, stencil art, and wheatpasting, can be found in many places throughout the city. Prominent street art precincts include; Fitzroy, Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick, St. Kilda, and the CBD, where stencil and sticker art is prominent. As one moves farther away from the city, mostly along suburban train lines, graffiti tags become more prominent. Many international artists such as Banksy have left their work in Melbourne and in early 2008 a perspex screen was installed to prevent a Banksy stencil art piece from being destroyed, it has survived since 2003 through the respect of local street artists avoiding posting over it, although it has recently had paint tipped over it.
In February 2008 Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister at that time, announced a government crackdown on tagging and other forms of graffiti vandalism, describing it as a destructive crime representing an invasion of public and private property. New legislation subsequently adopted included a ban on the sale of paint spray cans to persons under 18 and increases in maximum fines for the offence from NZ$200 to NZ$2,000 or extended community service. The issue of tagging become a widely debated one following an incident in Auckland during January 2008 in which a middle-aged property owner stabbed one of two teenage taggers to death and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.
Graffiti databases have increased in the past decade because they allow vandalism incidents to be fully documented against an offender and help the police and prosecution charge and prosecute offenders for multiple counts of vandalism. They also provide law enforcement the ability to rapidly search for an offender's moniker or tag in a simple, effective, and comprehensive way. These systems can also help track costs of damage to a city to help allocate an anti-graffiti budget. The theory is that when an offender is caught putting up graffiti, they are not just charged with one count of vandalism; they can be held accountable for all the other damage for which they are responsible. This has two main benefits for law enforcement. One, it sends a signal to the offenders that their vandalism is being tracked. Two, a city can seek restitution from offenders for all the damage that they have committed, not merely a single incident. These systems give law enforcement personnel real-time, street-level intelligence that allows them not only to focus on the worst graffiti offenders and their damage, but also to monitor potential gang violence that is associated with the graffiti.
Many restrictions of civil gang injunctions are designed to help address and protect the physical environment and limit graffiti. Provisions of gang injunctions include things such as restricting the possession of marker pens, spray paint cans, or other sharp objects capable of defacing private or public property; spray painting, or marking with marker pens, scratching, applying stickers, or otherwise applying graffiti on any public or private property, including, but not limited to the street, alley, residences, block walls, and fences, vehicles or any other real or personal property. Some injunctions contain wording that restricts damaging or vandalizing both public and private property, including but not limited to any vehicle, light fixture, door, fence, wall, gate, window, building, street sign, utility box, telephone box, tree, or power pole.
To help address many of these issues, many local jurisdictions have set up graffiti abatement hotlines, where citizens can call in and report vandalism and have it removed. San Diego's hotline receives more than 5,000 calls per year, in addition to reporting the graffiti, callers can learn more about prevention. One of the complaints about these hotlines is the response time; there is often a lag time between a property owner calling about the graffiti and its removal. The length of delay should be a consideration for any jurisdiction planning on operating a hotline. Local jurisdictions must convince the callers that their complaint of vandalism will be a priority and cleaned off right away. If the jurisdiction does not have the resources to respond to complaints in a timely manner, the value of the hotline diminishes. Crews must be able to respond to individual service calls made to the graffiti hotline as well as focus on cleanup near schools, parks, and major intersections and transit routes to have the biggest impact. Some cities offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of suspects for tagging or graffiti related vandalism. The amount of the reward is based on the information provided, and the action taken.
When police obtain search warrants in connection with a vandalism investigation, they are often seeking judicial approval to look for items such as cans of spray paint and nozzles from other kinds of aerosol sprays; etching tools, or other sharp or pointed objects, which could be used to etch or scratch glass and other hard surfaces; permanent marking pens, markers, or paint sticks; evidence of membership or affiliation with any gang or tagging crew; paraphernalia including any reference to "(tagger's name)"; any drawings, writing, objects, or graffiti depicting taggers' names, initials, logos, monikers, slogans, or any mention of tagging crew membership; and any newspaper clippings relating to graffiti crime.
© All Rights Reserved - No Usage Allowed in Any Form Without My Written Consent.
"let there be light where there is darkness"
Sunrise on a brand new day of hope ~
~ for the innocents of the world...
Image: sunrise in a chilly Scottish October.
Editing: Photoshop.
Read about Diwali, the October/November Festival of Lights:
BBC: Religion & Ethics - Hinduism,
Thanks to my inspiration: words of Peace.
Without any digital camera.
Sans appareil photo numérique.
Ohne Digitalkamera.
kwerfeldein.de/2015/03/21/namibia-entschleunigt-ein-reise...
The show must go on, even without its actor who comes back into the shadow of his rooms, that so much have told of invisible worlds, past and present lives, poetry, melancholy, joy, visions…
Thanks to the audience of this small theatre, if we can consider this way this world called “flickr”, and let the show go on…
See you soon...
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Lo spettacolo deve continuare, anche senza il suo attore che se ne torna nell' ombra dei suoi ambienti, che tanto hanno raccontato di mondi invisibili, di vite passate, di vite presenti, di poesia, di malinconie, di gioie e di visioni...
Un grazie alla platea, riunita in questo piccolo teatro, se possiamo considerarlo cosi questo mondo chiamato flickr, e che lo spettacolo continui...
A presto...
Empty spaces - what are we living for
Abandoned places - I guess we know the score
On and on, does anybody know what we are looking for...
Another hero, another mindless crime
Behind the curtain, in the pantomime
Hold the line, does anybody want to take it anymore
The show must go on,
The show must go on
Inside my heart is breaking
My make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on.
Whatever happens, Ill leave it all to chance
Another heartache, another failed romance
On and on, does anybody know what we are living for?
I guess Im learning, I must be warmer now
Ill soon be turning, round the corner now
Outside the dawn is breaking
But inside in the dark Im aching to be free
The show must go on
The show must go on
Inside my heart is breaking
My make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on
My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die
I can fly - my friends
The show must go on
The show must go on....
Nikon F801s
Neopan 1600
Block Post without a loop: Carrick-on-Suir Signal Cabin on Thursday, 21st July 2022.
The loop was lifted c. 2013.
Nice comments without pictures or badges are welcome. .
As Flickr is a sharing site I only add my pictures to public groups, .
Photography training courses available, please email for details.
Photographer:- Tim Large
purpleport.com/portfolio/timlarge/
Location:- Portishead, North Somerset, England.
The full portfolio available from Stock photography by Tim Large at Alamy
©Timothy Large - TA Craft Photography
PGB Photographer & Creative - © Philip Romeyn - Phillostar Gone Ballistic 2021 - Photo may not be edited from its original form. Commercial use is prohibited without contacting me.
Some of you may have noticed that, unfortunately, owing to the fact that a certain person who sells truck photos on eBay commercially has been lifting my images from this album and selling them I have had to remove 2300 photos that didn't have a watermark. I have now run around 1700 through Lightroom and added a watermark with the intention of bulk uploading them again. Rather than watermark the existing (hidden) files in Flickr one at a time it will be easier to do it this way. I definitely won’t be adding individual tags with the make and model of each vehicle I will just add generic transport tags. Each photo is named after the vehicle and reg in any case. For anyone new to these images there is a chapter and verse explanation below. It is staggering how many times I get asked questions that a quick scan would answer or just as likely I can’t possibly answer – I didn’t take them, but, just to clarify-I do own the copyright- and I do pursue copyright theft.
This is a collection of scanned prints from a collection of photographs taken by the late Jim Taylor A number of years ago I was offered a large number of photographs taken by Jim Taylor, a transport photographer based in Huddersfield. The collection, 30,000 prints, 20,000 negatives – and copyright! – had been offered to me and one of the national transport magazines previously by a friend of Jim's, on behalf of Jim's wife. I initially turned them down, already having over 30,000 of my own prints filed away and taking space up. Several months later the prints were still for sale – at what was, apparently, the going rate. It was a lot of money and I deliberated for quite a while before deciding to buy them. I did however buy them directly from Jim’s wife and she delivered them personally – just to quash the occasional rumour from people who can’t mind their own business. Although some prints were sold elsewhere, particularly the popular big fleet stuff, I should have the negatives, unfortunately they came to me in a random mix, 1200 to a box, without any sort of indexing and as such it would be impossible to match negatives to prints, or, to even find a print of any particular vehicle. I have only ever looked at a handful myself unless I am scanning them. The prints are generally in excellent condition and I initially stored them in a bedroom without ever looking at any of them. In 2006 I built an extension and they had to be well protected from dust and moved a few times. Ultimately my former 6x7 box room office has become their (and my own work’s) permanent home.
I hope to avoid posting images that Jim had not taken his self, however should I inadvertently infringe another photographers copyright, please inform me by email and I will resolve the issue immediately. There are copyright issues with some of the photographs that were sold to me. A Flickr member from Scotland drew my attention to some of his own work amongst the first uploads of Jim’s work. I had a quick look through some of the 30 boxes of prints and decided that for the time being the safest thing for me to do was withdraw the majority of the earlier uploaded scans and deal with the problem – which I did. whilst the vast majority of the prints are Jims, there is a problem defining copyright of some of them, this is something that the seller did not make clear at the time. I am reasonably confident that I have since been successful in identifying Jims own work. His early work consists of many thousands of lustre 6x4 prints which are difficult to scan well, later work is almost entirely 7x5 glossy, much easier to scan. Not all of the prints are pin sharp but I can generally print successfully to A4 from a scan.
You may notice photographs being duplicated in this Album, unfortunately there are multiple copies of many prints (for swapping) and as I have to have a system of archiving and backing up I can only guess - using memory - if I have scanned a print before. The bigger fleets have so many similar vehicles and registration numbers that it is impossible to get it right all of the time. It is easier to scan and process a print than check my files - on three different PC’s - for duplicates. There has not been, nor will there ever be, any intention to knowingly breach anyone else's copyright. I have presented the Jim Taylor collection as exactly that-The Jim Taylor Collection- his work not mine, my own work is quite obviously mine.
Unfortunately, many truck spotters have swapped and traded their work without copyright marking it as theirs. These people never anticipated the ease with which images would be shared online in the future. I would guess that having swapped and traded photos for many years that it is almost impossible to control their future use. Anyone wanting to control the future use of their work would have been well advised to copyright mark their work (as many did) and would be well advised not to post them on photo sharing sites without a watermark as the whole point of these sites is to share the image, it is very easy for those that wish, to lift any image, despite security settings, indeed, Flickr itself, warns you that this is the case. It was this abuse and theft of my material that led me to watermark all of my later uploads. I may yet withdraw non-watermarked photos, I haven’t decided yet. (I did in the end)
To anyone reading the above it will be quite obvious that I can’t provide information regarding specific photos or potential future uploads – I didn’t take them! There are many vehicles that were well known to me as Jim only lived down the road from me (although I didn’t know him), however scanning, titling, tagging and uploading is laborious and time consuming enough, I do however provide a fair amount of information with my own transport (and other) photos. I am aware that there are requests from other Flickr users that are unanswered, I stumble across them months or years after they were posted, this isn’t deliberate. Some weekends one or two “enthusiasts” can add many hundreds of photos as favourites, this pushes requests that are in the comments section ten or twenty pages out of sight and I miss them. I also have notifications switched off, I receive around 50 emails a day through work and I don’t want even more from Flickr. Other requests, like many other things, I just plain forget – no excuses! Uploads of Jim’s photos will be infrequent as it is a boring pastime and I would much rather work on my own output.
I have always thought that Elmstone was the only Kent church without dedication to a Saint/King or Martyr, but it seems East Farleigh has has St Mary foisted upon it.
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Many churches that one spends years trying to see inside of, turn out to be disappointments.
But not so of the Farleighs, East and West.
With West being open and being a delight, what then of East, hidden as it is behind the village hall and old schoolhouse?
I went down the alleyway, round the corner and through the gate and saw that the porch was open, and in the inner door was too.
Again, I was greeted warmly, and once inside I saw a large and impressive church that stay almost hidden from the road above it.
I have always arrived at East Farleigh from West Farleigh, meaning that I arrive at the car park, and then go through the narrow passage way between the old school and village hall.
But looking on GSV, there are fine views from the crossroads opposite the Bull Inn, through the lych gave and down the sunken path to the church.
I am usually speeding away to my next destination at this point, so don't look in my rear view mirror.
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Who would have thought that 150 years ago the picturesque church perched high above the River Medway was the scene of fierce dissent over ritualistic practices? The church was one of the first in the country to have a robed choir. The sunken path from the south shows how much the ground level has risen over the centuries and leads to a porch with a fine parvise. Although the church has been rather heavily restored it contains much of interest. Of special note is the Tudor font cover which sits on a fourteenth century font. The chancel and south chapel were both embellished by the firm of Powell's and much glass and wall decoration is by them. They created a rich focus for Eucharistic worship as a contrast to the rather plain nave and aisles. The south chancel window, with WW1 scenes is a fine example of their work.
www.kentchurches.info/church.asp?p=East+Farleigh
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EAST FARLEIGH.
NORTH-WESTWARD from Linton, on the opposite side of Cocks-heath, and on the southern bank of the river Medway lies the parish of East Farleigh, so called to distinguish it from the adjoining parish of West Farleigh, in Twyford hundred. It is called by Leland, in his Itinerary, Great Farleigh.
In the record of Domesday it is written Ferlaga, and in the Textus Roffensis, FEARNLEGA, and most probably took its name, as well as the parish of West Farleigh, from the passage over the river Medway at one or both of these places, fare in Saxon signifying a journey or passage, and lega, a place, i. e. the place of the way or passage.
THE PARISH of East Farleigh is situated about two miles from Maidstone, it lies on high ground, the soil a loam, covering but very slightly a bed of quarry stone. It is exceeding fertile, especially for fruit trees and the hop-plant, of which, especially about the village, there are many plantations. Its extent is about two miles each way; the river Medway is its northern boundary, over which here is an old gothic stone bridge of five arches, which is repaired at the county charge. The tide, in memory of some now living, flowed up as high as this bridge, but since the locks have been erected on this river to promote the navi gation, it has stopped from flowing higher than that just above Maidstone bridge. From the river the ground rises suddenly and steep southward, forming a beautiful combination of objects to the sight, having the village and church on the height, intersected with large spreading oaks and plantations of fruit, and the luxuriant hop, whilst the river Medway gliding its silver stream below, reflects the varied landscape. The village, through which the road leads from Tovill to West Farleigh, stands on the knole of the hill, about a quarter of a mile from the river, having the church and vicarage in it; eastward lies the hamlet of Danestreet, and further on Pimpes-court, at the extremity of this parish next to Loose, in which part of the lands belonging to it lie. At a small distance westward of the village of East Farleigh, is a genteel house, formerly belonging to a family of the name of Darby, some of whom are mentioned in the parish register as inhabitants of it, as far back as the year 1653. Mr. John Darby, the last of them, died in 1755, and by will gave this house to his widow, (Mary, daughter of Captain Elmstone, of Egerton) who re-married Mr. James Drury, of Maidstone, by whom she had one daughter, Mary. Since his death in 1764, she again became possessed of it, and resides in it; from hence the ground keeps still rising southward to Cocksheath, between which and the village is the manor of Gallants, part of the heath is within this parish, which reaches within a quarter of a mile of the house called Boughton Cock, part of Loose parish intervening, and separating the eastern extremity of it entirely from the rest. In this part of the parish are some quarries of Kentish rag stone, commonly called the Boughton quarries, from their lying mostly in that parish, and on the banks of the Medway there are more of the same fort, wholly in this of Farleigh.
A younger branch of the clerks of Ford, in Wrotham, resided here in the reigns of queen Elizabeth and king James I. as appears by the parish register. Dr. Plot mentions in his natural history of Oxfordshire, some large teeth having been dug up here, one of which was seven inches round, and weighed five ounces and an eighth, but I can gain no further information of them.
THIS PLACE was given by queen Ediva, or as she is called by some Edgiva, the mother of king Edmund and Eadred, in the year 961, to Christ-church, in Canterbury, free from all secular service, excepting the repairing of bridges, and the building of castles; (fn. 1) and it continued in the possession of that church at the time of the taking the general survey of Domesday, in the year 1080, being the 15th of the Conqueror's reign, in which it is thus described, under the general title of Terra Monachorum Archiepi, or lands of Christ-church, in Canterbury.
The archbishop himself holds Ferlaga. It was taxed at six sulings. The arable land is 26 carucates. In demesne there are four, and 35 villeins, with 56 borderers, having 30 carucates. There is a church and three mills of twenty-seven shillings and eight pence. There are 8 servants, and 6 fisheries, of one thousand two hundred eels. There are 12 acres of pasture. Wood for the pannage of 115 hogs.
Of the land of this manor Godefrid held in fee half a suling, and has there two carucates, and seven villeins with 10 borderers having three carucates, and four servants, and one mill of twenty pence, and four acres of meadow, and wood for the pannage of 30 hogs.
The whole manor, in the time of king Edward the Confessor was worth sixteen pounds, and afterwards as much, and now twenty-two pounds. What Abel now holds is worth six pounds, what Godefrid nine pounds, what Richard in his lowy, four pounds.
In the time of king Edward I. the manor of East Farleigh, together with the estate belonging to Christchurch, in the neighbouring parish of Hunton, was valued at forty-two pounds per annum.
King Edward II. in his 10th year, confirmed to the prior of Christ-church free warren, in all the demesne lands which he possessed here in the time of his grandfather, or at any time since. (fn. 2) This manor continued part of the possessions of the priory, till its dissolution in the 31st year of king Henry VIII. when it was surrendered into the king's hands, who that year granted it, among other premises, to Sir Thomas Wyatt, and his heirs male, to hold in capite by knight's service, but his son, Sir Thomas Wyatt, having raised a rebellion in the 1st year of queen Mary was attainted, and his estates became forfeited to the crown, and were together with the reversion of them, assured to the queen and her heirs, by an act passed for that purpose. After which, though the queen made a grant of the scite and capital messuage of this manor, to Sir John Baker, as will be further mentioned hereafter, yet the manor itself continued in the crown, and remained so at the death of king Charles I. in 1648. After which the powers then in being, passed an ordinance to vest the royal estates in trustees, in order for sale, to supply the necessities of the state, when on a survey taken of this manor it appeared, that there were quit-rents due to the lord from freeholders, in free socage tenure in this parish, and within the townships of Linton and East Peckham, and from several dens in the Weald; that there were common fines from the borsholders of Stokenburie, in East Peckham, and of Badmonden, Stoberfield and Rocden, the produce of all which yearly, with the fines, profits, &c. of courts, coibus annis, amounted in the total to 56l. 7s. 7½d. That there was a court ba ron and court leet; that the freeholders paid a heriot on demise, or death of the best living thing of any such tenant, or in want of it, 3s. 4d. (fn. 3)
Soon after which this manor was sold by the state to colonel Robert Gibbon, with whom it continued till the restoration of king Charles II. when it again became part of the revenues of the crown.
The grant of it has been many years in the family of his Grace the duke of Leeds, who now holds it at the yearly fee farm rent of ten shillings.
BUT THE SCITE and capital messuage of the manor of East Farleigh, now called the COURT LODGE, with all the demesne lands of the manor, about two hundred acres, in East Farleigh and Linton, was granted, anno 1st and 2d Philip and Mary, to Sir John Baker, one of the queen's privy council, (fn. 4) to hold in capite by knights service. (fn. 5) He died in the 5th and 6th years of that reign, and by will devised it to his second son, Mr. John Baker, of London; whose son, Sir Richard Baker, the chronicler, about the latter end of queen Elizabeth's reign, alienated it to Sir Thomas Fane, of Burston, in Hunton; who died in 1606, without issue, and bequeathed this among the rest of his estates to Sir George Fane, second son of Sir Thomas Fane, of Badsell, by Mary his wife, baroness le Despenser; he was succeeded in 1640, by his eldest son, colonel Thomas Fane, of Burston, who in the reign of king Charles II. alienated it to Mr. John Amhurst, who then resided at the court lodge as tenant under him.
He was the grandson of Nicholas Amerst, for so he spelt his name, who was of East Farleigh, in 1616, to whom William Camden, clarencieux, in 1607, assigned this coat of arms, Gules, three tilting spears, two and one, erected in pale or, headed argent, who dying in 1692, was buried in this church, as were his several descendants. His eldest son, Nicholas Amherst, for so he wrote his name, became his heir, and resided as tenant at the Court lodge, and died in 1679.
John Amhurst, gent. his eldest son, resided at the Court lodge, which he afterwards purchased of Col. Fane above mentioned; he served the office of sheriff in 1699, and kept his shrievalty here; though married, he died in 1711, s. p. and by will gave this estate to his brother, captain Nicholas Amhurst, of Barnjet, who died in 1715.
He married Susannah Evering, by whom he had issue fifteen children; John, who resided at the Court lodge, and died in his life time, whose grandson, John Amhurst, esq. is now of Boxley abbey; and George, the second son, who was twice married, but left issue only by his second wife, Susan, the eldest of whose sons was John Amhurst, esq. late of Rochester. Nicholas, the next son, died in 1736, unmarried. Stephen, another of the sons, was of West Farleigh, and dying in 1760, was buried at West Farleigh, leaving three sons; John Amhurst, esq. now of Barnjet; Edward, who was of Barnjet, and died in 1762, aged 20, and was buried near his father; and Stephen Amhurst, esq. now of West Farleigh, and four daughters. Edward, another son, was of Barnjet, and died in 1756, without issue, and was buried at Barming.
Of the daughters, Susan married Edward Walsingham, of Callis court, in Ryarsh, who left by her two daughters; Susan, married to Sir Edw. Austen, bart. of Boxley abbey; and Mary, married to John Miller. Jane, married to James Allen, by whom she had two sons, James, now deceased; and William, devisees in the will of Sir Edward Austen; and a daughter, married to Nicholas Amhurst, father of John, of Boxley abbey.
George Amhurst, gent. above mentioned, the second but eldest surviving son of Nicholas, by Susan nah Evering, had the Court lodge by his father's will, who having neglected to cut off an entail of it, his three other sons, Nicholas, Stephen, and Edward, claimed their respective shares in it; the entire fee of which, after much dispute, partly by purchase, and partly by agreement, became vested in Edward Amhurst, gent. the youngest son, who died, s. p. in 1756, and devised it by will to his next elder brother, Stephen Amhurst, esq. gent. of West Farleigh; who, at his death, in 1760, gave it to his eldest son, John Amhurst, esq. now of Barnjet, the present possessor of the Court lodge, and the estate belonging to it.
The mansion of the court lodge is situated adjoining to the west side of the church yard; it has not been inhabited but by cottagers for many years; great part of it seems to have been pulled down, and the remains make but a very mean appearance.
GALLANT'S is a manor in this parish, which seems to have been in early times the estate of a branch of the eminent family of Colepeper, whose arms yet remain in the windows of this church, and in which there is an ancient arched tomb, under which one of them was buried.
By inquisition, taken after the death of Walter Colepeper, at Tunbridge, anno 1 Edward III. it was found that he held in gavelkind in fee, certain tenements in East Farleigh, of the prior of Christ church, by service, and making suit at the court of the prior of East Farleigh, that there were there one capital messuage, with lands, and rents in money and in hens, by which it appears to have been a manor, and that his sons, Thomas, Jeffry, and John, were his next heirs. The above premises seem very probably to have been what is now called the manor of Gallant's, which afterwards passed into the family of Roper, who held it for some length of time, this branch of them, who possessed this manor, being created by king James I. barons of Teynham, one of whom, John Roper, the third lord Teynham, died possessed of it in 1627, as appears by the inquisition then taken. His grandson, Christopher lord Teynham, gave it in marriage with his daughter Catharine, to Wm. Sheldon, esq. whose descendant, Richard Sheldon, esq. of Aldington, in Thurnham, gave it by will to his widow, who soon afterwards, in 1738, carried it in marriage to Wm. Jones, M. D. who died in 1780, leaving his two daughters his coheirs; Mary, married to Lock Rollinson, esq. of Oxfordshire, and Anne to Tho. Russel, esq. and they, in right of their wives, are at this time respectively entitled to this manor.
The manor house has an antient appearance, both within and without, the doors being arched, and as well as the windows, cased with ashlar stone, and much of the walls built with flint.
PIMPE'S-COURT is a manor and antient seat in this parish, the mansion of which is situated at the southern extremity of it next to Loose. It was formerly part of the possessions of the family of Pimpe, being one of the seats of their residence, whence it acquired their name in process of time, among other of their possessions in this neighbourhood and else where in this county. It appears to have been antiently held of the family of Clare, earls of Gloucester; of whom, as chief lords of the fee, it was again held by this eminent family of Pimpe, from whom though it acquired its name of Pimpe'scourt, yet their principal habitation seems to have been in the parish of Nettlested, not far distant. Rich. de Pimpe of Nettlested held it in the reigns of Edward I. and III. as did his descendant, Sir Philip de Pimpe, in the begining of that of Edward I. being at that time a man of great repute. His widow, Joane, married John de Coloigne, who together with her son, Thomas de Pimpe, paid aid for this manor in the 20th year of king Edward III. Philipott says, Margaret de Cobham, wife of Sir William de Pimpe, died in 1337, and was buried in this church. Her tomb is yet remaining, but the inscription, then visible, is gone. Wil liam, son of Thomas de Pimpe, of Nettlested, died in the time of his shrievalty, anno 49 Edward III. and his son, Reginald, who then resided here at East Farleigh, served out the remainder of the year. His descendant of the same name resided here at the time of his shrievalty, in the 10th year of king Henry IV. to whose son, John, two years afterwards, John de Fremingham, of Loose, gave by will his estate there and elsewhere, in this county, in tail mail, remainder to Roger Isle, as being of the nearest blood to him. His descendant, John Pimpe, esq. kept his shrievalty here in the 2d year of king Henry VII. whose only daughter and heir, Winifrid, carried this seat in marriage to Sir John Rainsford, who passed it away to Sir Henry Isley, who by the act of the 2d and 3d of king Edward VI. procured his lands in this county to be disgavelled.
Soon after which he seems to have settled this manor on his son, William Isley, esq. but being both concerned in the rebellion raised by Sir Thomas Wyatt, in the 1st year of queen Mary, they were then attainted, and Sir Henry was executed at Sevenoke, and the lands of both became forfeited to the crown; after which, queen Mary that year granted this manor, by the name of Lose, alias Pimpe's court, with its appurtenances, in Lose, East Farleigh, Linton, &c. to Sir John Baker, her attorney general, to hold in capite by knights service. (fn. 6) In his descendants the manor of Pimpe's court continued till Sir John Baker, bart, about of the end of king Charles I.'s reign, alienated it to Thomas Fsloyd, esq. of Gore court in Otham; one of whose descendants alienated it to Browne, in which name it remained till, by the daughter and heir of Tho. Browne, esq. it went in marriage to Holden; and their son, Richard Holden, of Coptford hall, in Essex, died without issue, in 1772, and by will gave it to his widow, whose maiden name was Anne Blackenbury; and after her decease, to his sister's daughter's son, a minor, by Mr. William Vechell, of Cambridgeshire.
The present house of this manor is a modern building; the ruins of the antient mansion are still to be seen about the present house; the south-west end is still remaining, and by tradition was called the Old chapel. Further towards the north is a room with a very large chimney, and an oven in it, no doubt the old kitchen. The gateway, with a room over it, was taken down within memory; by the remains, it seems as if the house and offices belonging to it, when intire, formed a quadrangle. There is a court baron held for this manor.
CHARITIES.
JOHN FRANCKELDEN, citizen of London, in 1610, left 100l. to build six cottages for poor people to live in, rent free, vested in the parish officers.
THE REV. ARTHUR HARRIS gave, by will, in 1727, 2l. 10s. per annum for ever, to be paid out of Half Yoke farm, to be distributed in linen.
THOMAS HARRIS, esq. who died in 1769, left 5l. per ann. for fifty years, to be given to the poor in bread, 2s. every Sunday, excepting Easter and Whitsunday, vested in the executors of John Mumford, esq.
Mr. THOMAS FOSTER, in 1776, gave by will 130l. the interest of it to be laid out in linen and woollen, and to be given to the poor who do not receive alms at Christmas; from which money, 225l. confol. 3 per cent. Bank ann. was bought in the name of trustees, now of the annual produce of 6l. 15s.
EAST FARLEIGH is within the ECCLESTASTICAL JURISDICTION of the diocese of Rochester, and being a peculiar of the archbishop, is as such within the deanry of Shoreham.
The church, which is a handsome building, with a spire steeple at the west end, stands at the east end of the village, and consists of two isles and two chancels; that on the south side belongs to Pimpe's-court. It was repaired in 1704, by Dr. Griffith Hatley, who had married the widow of Mr. Browne, and possessed that estate in her right. The whole was, through the laudable care of the late vicar, Mr. De la Douespe, new pewed and handsomely ornamented.
In the rector's chancel are several memorials of the family of Amhurst, and within the altar rails two of Goldsmith. On the north side of this chancel is a very antient altar tomb for one of the family of Colepeper, having their shield, a bend engrailed, at one corner of it, most probably for Sir T. Colepeper, who lived in the reign of king Edward III. and is reputed to have been the founder of this church. His arms, quartered with those of Joane Hadrreshull, his mother, Argent, a chevron gules between nine martlets, are still remaining in the east window of the south chancel, called Pimpe's chancel, in which is an antient plain altar tomb, probably for one of either that or of the Pimpe family. There seems once to have been a chapel dependent on this church, called in the Textus Roffensis, Liuituna capella Anfridi.
The patronage of the church of East Farleigh was part of the antient possessions of the crown, and remained so till it was given to the college or hospital for poor travellers, in Maidstone, founded by archbishop Boniface. Archbishop Walter Reynolds, about 1314, appropriated this church to the use and support of the hospital. In the 19th year of king Richard II. archbishop Courtney, on his making the church of Maidstone collegiate, obtained the king's licence to give and assign that hospital and its revenues, among which was the advowson and patronage of the church of Farleigh, among others appropriated to it, and then of the king's patronage, and held of the king in capite, to the master and chaplains of his new collegiate church, to hold in free, pure, and perpetual alms for ever, for their better maintenance; (fn. 7) to which appropriation Adam Mottrum, archdeacon of Canbury, gave his consent.
¶The collegiate church of Maidstone was dissolved by the act of the 1st of king Edward VI. anno 1546, and was surrendered into the king's hand accordingly with all its lands, possessions, &c. Since which the patronage and advowson of the vicarage of East Farleigh has remained in the hands of the crown; but the parsonage or great tithes was granted to one of the family of Vane, or Fane, in whom it continued down to John Fane, earl of Westmoreland, who at his death, in 1762, gave it by will, among the rest of his Kentish estates, to his nephew, Sir Francis Dashwood, lord Despencer; since which it has passed, in like manner as Mereworth and his other estates in this county, by the entail of the earl of Westmoreland's will, to Thomas Stapleton, lord Despencer, the present owner of it.
In the 15th year of king Edward I. the vicarage was valued at ten marcs; in the year 1589, it was estimated at 16l. 8s. yearly income. In the reign of king Richard II. the church of Ferleghe was valued at 13l. 16s. 8d. This vicarage is valued in the king's books at 6l. 16s. 8d. and the yearly tenths at 13s. 8d.
John, son of Sir Ralph de Fremingham, of Lose, 12 Henry IV. by his will gave certain lands therein mentioned to John Pympe, and his heirs male, to find a chaplain in this church, in the chapel of the Blessed Mary, newly built, to celebrate there, for twenty-four years, for the souls of himself, his wife, &c. and all of whom he then held lands, the said John Pympe, paying to the above chaplain the salary of ten marcs yearly, &c.
The vicar of East Farleigh is endowed with the tithes of corn growing on the lands belonging to the parsonage of East Farleigh, and of certain pieces of land, called garden spots, which lie dispersed in this parish. It is now of the clear yearly value of about one hundred and thirty guineas.
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Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire (see also mural).
Graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered by property owners and civic authorities as defacement and vandalism, which is a punishable crime, citing the use of graffiti by street gangs to mark territory or to serve as an indicator of gang-related activities. Graffiti has become visualized as a growing urban "problem" for many cities in industrialized nations, spreading from the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s to the rest of the United States and Europe and other world regions
"Graffiti" (usually both singular and plural) and the rare singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched"). The term "graffiti" is used in art history for works of art produced by scratching a design into a surface. A related term is "sgraffito", which involves scratching through one layer of pigment to reveal another beneath it. This technique was primarily used by potters who would glaze their wares and then scratch a design into them. In ancient times graffiti were carved on walls with a sharp object, although sometimes chalk or coal were used. The word originates from Greek γράφειν—graphein—meaning "to write".
The term graffiti originally referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, and such, found on the walls of ancient sepulchres or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Historically, these writings were not considered vanadlism, which today is considered part of the definition of graffiti.
The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.
Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are 40,000 year old ones found in Australia. The oldest written graffiti was found in ancient Rome around 2500 years ago. Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was not considered vandalism.
Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there. One reads:
Wet with cool dew drops
fragrant with perfume from the flowers
came the gentle breeze
jasmine and water lily
dance in the spring sunshine
side-long glances
of the golden-hued ladies
stab into my thoughts
heaven itself cannot take my mind
as it has been captivated by one lass
among the five hundred I have seen here.
Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.
Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.
There are also examples of graffiti occurring in American history, such as Independence Rock, a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.
Later, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt in the 1790s. Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, Greece.
The oldest known example of graffiti "monikers" found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.
In World War II, an inscription on a wall at the fortress of Verdun was seen as an illustration of the US response twice in a generation to the wrongs of the Old World:
During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".
Modern graffiti art has its origins with young people in 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti. Eventually, throw-ups and pieces evolved with the desire to create larger art. Writers used spray paint and other kind of materials to leave tags or to create images on the sides subway trains. and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.
While the art had many advocates and appreciators—including the cultural critic Norman Mailer—others, including New York City mayor Ed Koch, considered it to be defacement of public property, and saw it as a form of public blight. The ‘taggers’ called what they did ‘writing’—though an important 1974 essay by Mailer referred to it using the term ‘graffiti.’
Contemporary graffiti style has been heavily influenced by hip hop culture and the myriad international styles derived from Philadelphia and New York City Subway graffiti; however, there are many other traditions of notable graffiti in the twentieth century. Graffiti have long appeared on building walls, in latrines, railroad boxcars, subways, and bridges.
An early graffito outside of New York or Philadelphia was the inscription in London reading "Clapton is God" in reference to the guitarist Eric Clapton. Creating the cult of the guitar hero, the phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in an Islington, north London in the autumn of 1967. The graffito was captured in a photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall.
Films like Style Wars in the 80s depicting famous writers such as Skeme, Dondi, MinOne, and ZEPHYR reinforced graffiti's role within New York's emerging hip-hop culture. Although many officers of the New York City Police Department found this film to be controversial, Style Wars is still recognized as the most prolific film representation of what was going on within the young hip hop culture of the early 1980s. Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 took hip hop graffiti to Paris and London as part of the New York City Rap Tour in 1983
Commercialization and entrance into mainstream pop culture
Main article: Commercial graffiti
With the popularity and legitimization of graffiti has come a level of commercialization. In 2001, computer giant IBM launched an advertising campaign in Chicago and San Francisco which involved people spray painting on sidewalks a peace symbol, a heart, and a penguin (Linux mascot), to represent "Peace, Love, and Linux." IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco collectively US$120,000 for punitive damages and clean-up costs.
In 2005, a similar ad campaign was launched by Sony and executed by its advertising agency in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, to market its handheld PSP gaming system. In this campaign, taking notice of the legal problems of the IBM campaign, Sony paid building owners for the rights to paint on their buildings "a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle, or a rocking horse".
Tristan Manco wrote that Brazil "boasts a unique and particularly rich, graffiti scene ... [earning] it an international reputation as the place to go for artistic inspiration". Graffiti "flourishes in every conceivable space in Brazil's cities". Artistic parallels "are often drawn between the energy of São Paulo today and 1970s New York". The "sprawling metropolis", of São Paulo has "become the new shrine to graffiti"; Manco alludes to "poverty and unemployment ... [and] the epic struggles and conditions of the country's marginalised peoples", and to "Brazil's chronic poverty", as the main engines that "have fuelled a vibrant graffiti culture". In world terms, Brazil has "one of the most uneven distributions of income. Laws and taxes change frequently". Such factors, Manco argues, contribute to a very fluid society, riven with those economic divisions and social tensions that underpin and feed the "folkloric vandalism and an urban sport for the disenfranchised", that is South American graffiti art.
Prominent Brazilian writers include Os Gêmeos, Boleta, Nunca, Nina, Speto, Tikka, and T.Freak. Their artistic success and involvement in commercial design ventures has highlighted divisions within the Brazilian graffiti community between adherents of the cruder transgressive form of pichação and the more conventionally artistic values of the practitioners of grafite.
Graffiti in the Middle East has emerged slowly, with taggers operating in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf countries like Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and in Iran. The major Iranian newspaper Hamshahri has published two articles on illegal writers in the city with photographic coverage of Iranian artist A1one's works on Tehran walls. Tokyo-based design magazine, PingMag, has interviewed A1one and featured photographs of his work. The Israeli West Bank barrier has become a site for graffiti, reminiscent in this sense of the Berlin Wall. Many writers in Israel come from other places around the globe, such as JUIF from Los Angeles and DEVIONE from London. The religious reference "נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן" ("Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman") is commonly seen in graffiti around Israel.
Graffiti has played an important role within the street art scene in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially following the events of the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Sudanese Revolution of 2018/19. Graffiti is a tool of expression in the context of conflict in the region, allowing people to raise their voices politically and socially. Famous street artist Banksy has had an important effect in the street art scene in the MENA area, especially in Palestine where some of his works are located in the West Bank barrier and Bethlehem.
There are also a large number of graffiti influences in Southeast Asian countries that mostly come from modern Western culture, such as Malaysia, where graffiti have long been a common sight in Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Since 2010, the country has begun hosting a street festival to encourage all generations and people from all walks of life to enjoy and encourage Malaysian street culture.
The modern-day graffitists can be found with an arsenal of various materials that allow for a successful production of a piece. This includes such techniques as scribing. However, spray paint in aerosol cans is the number one medium for graffiti. From this commodity comes different styles, technique, and abilities to form master works of graffiti. Spray paint can be found at hardware and art stores and comes in virtually every color.
Stencil graffiti is created by cutting out shapes and designs in a stiff material (such as cardboard or subject folders) to form an overall design or image. The stencil is then placed on the "canvas" gently and with quick, easy strokes of the aerosol can, the image begins to appear on the intended surface.
Some of the first examples were created in 1981 by artists Blek le Rat in Paris, in 1982 by Jef Aerosol in Tours (France); by 1985 stencils had appeared in other cities including New York City, Sydney, and Melbourne, where they were documented by American photographer Charles Gatewood and Australian photographer Rennie Ellis
Tagging is the practice of someone spray-painting "their name, initial or logo onto a public surface" in a handstyle unique to the writer. Tags were the first form of modern graffiti.
Modern graffiti art often incorporates additional arts and technologies. For example, Graffiti Research Lab has encouraged the use of projected images and magnetic light-emitting diodes (throwies) as new media for graffitists. yarnbombing is another recent form of graffiti. Yarnbombers occasionally target previous graffiti for modification, which had been avoided among the majority of graffitists.
Theories on the use of graffiti by avant-garde artists have a history dating back at least to the Asger Jorn, who in 1962 painting declared in a graffiti-like gesture "the avant-garde won't give up"
Many contemporary analysts and even art critics have begun to see artistic value in some graffiti and to recognize it as a form of public art. According to many art researchers, particularly in the Netherlands and in Los Angeles, that type of public art is, in fact an effective tool of social emancipation or, in the achievement of a political goal
In times of conflict, such murals have offered a means of communication and self-expression for members of these socially, ethnically, or racially divided communities, and have proven themselves as effective tools in establishing dialog and thus, of addressing cleavages in the long run. The Berlin Wall was also extensively covered by graffiti reflecting social pressures relating to the oppressive Soviet rule over the GDR.
Many artists involved with graffiti are also concerned with the similar activity of stenciling. Essentially, this entails stenciling a print of one or more colors using spray-paint. Recognized while exhibiting and publishing several of her coloured stencils and paintings portraying the Sri Lankan Civil War and urban Britain in the early 2000s, graffitists Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., has also become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos for singles "Galang" and "Bucky Done Gun", and her cover art. Stickers of her artwork also often appear around places such as London in Brick Lane, stuck to lamp posts and street signs, she having become a muse for other graffitists and painters worldwide in cities including Seville.
Graffitist believes that art should be on display for everyone in the public eye or in plain sight, not hidden away in a museum or a gallery. Art should color the streets, not the inside of some building. Graffiti is a form of art that cannot be owned or bought. It does not last forever, it is temporary, yet one of a kind. It is a form of self promotion for the artist that can be displayed anywhere form sidewalks, roofs, subways, building wall, etc. Art to them is for everyone and should be showed to everyone for free.
Graffiti is a way of communicating and a way of expressing what one feels in the moment. It is both art and a functional thing that can warn people of something or inform people of something. However, graffiti is to some people a form of art, but to some a form of vandalism. And many graffitists choose to protect their identities and remain anonymous or to hinder prosecution.
With the commercialization of graffiti (and hip hop in general), in most cases, even with legally painted "graffiti" art, graffitists tend to choose anonymity. This may be attributed to various reasons or a combination of reasons. Graffiti still remains the one of four hip hop elements that is not considered "performance art" despite the image of the "singing and dancing star" that sells hip hop culture to the mainstream. Being a graphic form of art, it might also be said that many graffitists still fall in the category of the introverted archetypal artist.
Banksy is one of the world's most notorious and popular street artists who continues to remain faceless in today's society. He is known for his political, anti-war stencil art mainly in Bristol, England, but his work may be seen anywhere from Los Angeles to Palestine. In the UK, Banksy is the most recognizable icon for this cultural artistic movement and keeps his identity a secret to avoid arrest. Much of Banksy's artwork may be seen around the streets of London and surrounding suburbs, although he has painted pictures throughout the world, including the Middle East, where he has painted on Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side. One depicted a hole in the wall with an idyllic beach, while another shows a mountain landscape on the other side. A number of exhibitions also have taken place since 2000, and recent works of art have fetched vast sums of money. Banksy's art is a prime example of the classic controversy: vandalism vs. art. Art supporters endorse his work distributed in urban areas as pieces of art and some councils, such as Bristol and Islington, have officially protected them, while officials of other areas have deemed his work to be vandalism and have removed it.
Pixnit is another artist who chooses to keep her identity from the general public. Her work focuses on beauty and design aspects of graffiti as opposed to Banksy's anti-government shock value. Her paintings are often of flower designs above shops and stores in her local urban area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some store owners endorse her work and encourage others to do similar work as well. "One of the pieces was left up above Steve's Kitchen, because it looks pretty awesome"- Erin Scott, the manager of New England Comics in Allston, Massachusetts.
Graffiti artists may become offended if photographs of their art are published in a commercial context without their permission. In March 2020, the Finnish graffiti artist Psyke expressed his displeasure at the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat publishing a photograph of a Peugeot 208 in an article about new cars, with his graffiti prominently shown on the background. The artist claims he does not want his art being used in commercial context, not even if he were to receive compensation.
Territorial graffiti marks urban neighborhoods with tags and logos to differentiate certain groups from others. These images are meant to show outsiders a stern look at whose turf is whose. The subject matter of gang-related graffiti consists of cryptic symbols and initials strictly fashioned with unique calligraphies. Gang members use graffiti to designate membership throughout the gang, to differentiate rivals and associates and, most commonly, to mark borders which are both territorial and ideological.
Graffiti has been used as a means of advertising both legally and illegally. Bronx-based TATS CRU has made a name for themselves doing legal advertising campaigns for companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Toyota, and MTV. In the UK, Covent Garden's Boxfresh used stencil images of a Zapatista revolutionary in the hopes that cross referencing would promote their store.
Smirnoff hired artists to use reverse graffiti (the use of high pressure hoses to clean dirty surfaces to leave a clean image in the surrounding dirt) to increase awareness of their product.
Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist, and anti-consumerist messages throughout the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names such as "De Zoot", "Vendex", and "Dr Rat". To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started that was called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there was already a vibrant graffiti culture.
The student protests and general strike of May 1968 saw Paris bedecked in revolutionary, anarchistic, and situationist slogans such as L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire ("Boredom is counterrevolutionary") and Lisez moins, vivez plus ("Read less, live more"). While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the 'millenarian' and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers.
I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like. Excuse the French, we're not a bunch of p---- artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we're a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.
The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming, or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s with the rise of Street Art, a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints and non-traditional forms of painting.
Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicize other art forms, and have used the prison sentences enforced on them as a means of further protest. The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each other's practices. For example, the anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.
Berlin human rights activist Irmela Mensah-Schramm has received global media attention and numerous awards for her 35-year campaign of effacing neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist graffiti throughout Germany, often by altering hate speech in humorous ways.
In Serbian capital, Belgrade, the graffiti depicting a uniformed former general of Serb army and war criminal, convicted at ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnian War, Ratko Mladić, appeared in a military salute alongside the words "General, thank to your mother". Aleks Eror, Berlin-based journalist, explains how "veneration of historical and wartime figures" through street art is not a new phenomenon in the region of former Yugoslavia, and that "in most cases is firmly focused on the future, rather than retelling the past". Eror is not only analyst pointing to danger of such an expressions for the region's future. In a long expose on the subject of Bosnian genocide denial, at Balkan Diskurs magazine and multimedia platform website, Kristina Gadže and Taylor Whitsell referred to these experiences as a young generations' "cultural heritage", in which young are being exposed to celebration and affirmation of war-criminals as part of their "formal education" and "inheritance".
There are numerous examples of genocide denial through celebration and affirmation of war criminals throughout the region of Western Balkans inhabited by Serbs using this form of artistic expression. Several more of these graffiti are found in Serbian capital, and many more across Serbia and Bosnian and Herzegovinian administrative entity, Republika Srpska, which is the ethnic Serbian majority enclave. Critics point that Serbia as a state, is willing to defend the mural of convicted war criminal, and have no intention to react on cases of genocide denial, noting that Interior Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vulin decision to ban any gathering with an intent to remove the mural, with the deployment of riot police, sends the message of "tacit endorsement". Consequently, on 9 November 2021, Serbian heavy police in riot gear, with graffiti creators and their supporters, blocked the access to the mural to prevent human rights groups and other activists to paint over it and mark the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism in that way, and even arrested two civic activist for throwing eggs at the graffiti.
Graffiti may also be used as an offensive expression. This form of graffiti may be difficult to identify, as it is mostly removed by the local authority (as councils which have adopted strategies of criminalization also strive to remove graffiti quickly). Therefore, existing racist graffiti is mostly more subtle and at first sight, not easily recognized as "racist". It can then be understood only if one knows the relevant "local code" (social, historical, political, temporal, and spatial), which is seen as heteroglot and thus a 'unique set of conditions' in a cultural context.
A spatial code for example, could be that there is a certain youth group in an area that is engaging heavily in racist activities. So, for residents (knowing the local code), a graffiti containing only the name or abbreviation of this gang already is a racist expression, reminding the offended people of their gang activities. Also a graffiti is in most cases, the herald of more serious criminal activity to come. A person who does not know these gang activities would not be able to recognize the meaning of this graffiti. Also if a tag of this youth group or gang is placed on a building occupied by asylum seekers, for example, its racist character is even stronger.
By making the graffiti less explicit (as adapted to social and legal constraints), these drawings are less likely to be removed, but do not lose their threatening and offensive character.
Elsewhere, activists in Russia have used painted caricatures of local officials with their mouths as potholes, to show their anger about the poor state of the roads. In Manchester, England, a graffitists painted obscene images around potholes, which often resulted in them being repaired within 48 hours.
In the early 1980s, the first art galleries to show graffitists to the public were Fashion Moda in the Bronx, Now Gallery and Fun Gallery, both in the East Village, Manhattan.
A 2006 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum displayed graffiti as an art form that began in New York's outer boroughs and reached great heights in the early 1980s with the work of Crash, Lee, Daze, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It displayed 22 works by New York graffitists, including Crash, Daze, and Lady Pink. In an article about the exhibition in the magazine Time Out, curator Charlotta Kotik said that she hoped the exhibition would cause viewers to rethink their assumptions about graffiti.
From the 1970s onwards, Burhan Doğançay photographed urban walls all over the world; these he then archived for use as sources of inspiration for his painterly works. The project today known as "Walls of the World" grew beyond even his own expectations and comprises about 30,000 individual images. It spans a period of 40 years across five continents and 114 countries. In 1982, photographs from this project comprised a one-man exhibition titled "Les murs murmurent, ils crient, ils chantent ..." (The walls whisper, shout and sing ...) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
In Australia, art historians have judged some local graffiti of sufficient creative merit to rank them firmly within the arts. Oxford University Press's art history text Australian Painting 1788–2000 concludes with a long discussion of graffiti's key place within contemporary visual culture, including the work of several Australian practitioners.
Between March and April 2009, 150 artists exhibited 300 pieces of graffiti at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Spray paint has many negative environmental effects. The paint contains toxic chemicals, and the can uses volatile hydrocarbon gases to spray the paint onto a surface.
Volatile organic compound (VOC) leads to ground level ozone formation and most of graffiti related emissions are VOCs. A 2010 paper estimates 4,862 tons of VOCs were released in the United States in activities related to graffiti.
In China, Mao Zedong in the 1920s used revolutionary slogans and paintings in public places to galvanize the country's communist movement.
Based on different national conditions, many people believe that China's attitude towards Graffiti is fierce, but in fact, according to Lance Crayon in his film Spray Paint Beijing: Graffiti in the Capital of China, Graffiti is generally accepted in Beijing, with artists not seeing much police interference. Political and religiously sensitive graffiti, however, is not allowed.
In Hong Kong, Tsang Tsou Choi was known as the King of Kowloon for his calligraphy graffiti over many years, in which he claimed ownership of the area. Now some of his work is preserved officially.
In Taiwan, the government has made some concessions to graffitists. Since 2005 they have been allowed to freely display their work along some sections of riverside retaining walls in designated "Graffiti Zones". From 2007, Taipei's department of cultural affairs also began permitting graffiti on fences around major public construction sites. Department head Yong-ping Lee (李永萍) stated, "We will promote graffiti starting with the public sector, and then later in the private sector too. It's our goal to beautify the city with graffiti". The government later helped organize a graffiti contest in Ximending, a popular shopping district. graffitists caught working outside of these designated areas still face fines up to NT$6,000 under a department of environmental protection regulation. However, Taiwanese authorities can be relatively lenient, one veteran police officer stating anonymously, "Unless someone complains about vandalism, we won't get involved. We don't go after it proactively."
In 1993, after several expensive cars in Singapore were spray-painted, the police arrested a student from the Singapore American School, Michael P. Fay, questioned him, and subsequently charged him with vandalism. Fay pleaded guilty to vandalizing a car in addition to stealing road signs. Under the 1966 Vandalism Act of Singapore, originally passed to curb the spread of communist graffiti in Singapore, the court sentenced him to four months in jail, a fine of S$3,500 (US$2,233), and a caning. The New York Times ran several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called on the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy with protests. Although the Singapore government received many calls for clemency, Fay's caning took place in Singapore on 5 May 1994. Fay had originally received a sentence of six strokes of the cane, but the presiding president of Singapore, Ong Teng Cheong, agreed to reduce his caning sentence to four lashes.
In South Korea, Park Jung-soo was fined two million South Korean won by the Seoul Central District Court for spray-painting a rat on posters of the G-20 Summit a few days before the event in November 2011. Park alleged that the initial in "G-20" sounds like the Korean word for "rat", but Korean government prosecutors alleged that Park was making a derogatory statement about the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the host of the summit. This case led to public outcry and debate on the lack of government tolerance and in support of freedom of expression. The court ruled that the painting, "an ominous creature like a rat" amounts to "an organized criminal activity" and upheld the fine while denying the prosecution's request for imprisonment for Park.
In Europe, community cleaning squads have responded to graffiti, in some cases with reckless abandon, as when in 1992 in France a local Scout group, attempting to remove modern graffiti, damaged two prehistoric paintings of bison in the Cave of Mayrière supérieure near the French village of Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in archeology.
In September 2006, the European Parliament directed the European Commission to create urban environment policies to prevent and eliminate dirt, litter, graffiti, animal excrement, and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems in European cities, along with other concerns over urban life.
In Budapest, Hungary, both a city-backed movement called I Love Budapest and a special police division tackle the problem, including the provision of approved areas.
The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 became Britain's latest anti-graffiti legislation. In August 2004, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign issued a press release calling for zero tolerance of graffiti and supporting proposals such as issuing "on the spot" fines to graffiti offenders and banning the sale of aerosol paint to anyone under the age of 16. The press release also condemned the use of graffiti images in advertising and in music videos, arguing that real-world experience of graffiti stood far removed from its often-portrayed "cool" or "edgy'" image.
To back the campaign, 123 Members of Parliament (MPs) (including then Prime Minister Tony Blair), signed a charter which stated: "Graffiti is not art, it's crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of this problem."
In the UK, city councils have the power to take action against the owner of any property that has been defaced under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005) or, in certain cases, the Highways Act. This is often used against owners of property that are complacent in allowing protective boards to be defaced so long as the property is not damaged.
In July 2008, a conspiracy charge was used to convict graffitists for the first time. After a three-month police surveillance operation, nine members of the DPM crew were convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal damage costing at least £1 million. Five of them received prison sentences, ranging from eighteen months to two years. The unprecedented scale of the investigation and the severity of the sentences rekindled public debate over whether graffiti should be considered art or crime.
Some councils, like those of Stroud and Loerrach, provide approved areas in the town where graffitists can showcase their talents, including underpasses, car parks, and walls that might otherwise prove a target for the "spray and run".
Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney at Camperdown (2009)
In an effort to reduce vandalism, many cities in Australia have designated walls or areas exclusively for use by graffitists. One early example is the "Graffiti Tunnel" located at the Camperdown Campus of the University of Sydney, which is available for use by any student at the university to tag, advertise, poster, and paint. Advocates of this idea suggest that this discourages petty vandalism yet encourages artists to take their time and produce great art, without worry of being caught or arrested for vandalism or trespassing.[108][109] Others disagree with this approach, arguing that the presence of legal graffiti walls does not demonstrably reduce illegal graffiti elsewhere. Some local government areas throughout Australia have introduced "anti-graffiti squads", who clean graffiti in the area, and such crews as BCW (Buffers Can't Win) have taken steps to keep one step ahead of local graffiti cleaners.
Many state governments have banned the sale or possession of spray paint to those under the age of 18 (age of majority). However, a number of local governments in Victoria have taken steps to recognize the cultural heritage value of some examples of graffiti, such as prominent political graffiti. Tough new graffiti laws have been introduced in Australia with fines of up to A$26,000 and two years in prison.
Melbourne is a prominent graffiti city of Australia with many of its lanes being tourist attractions, such as Hosier Lane in particular, a popular destination for photographers, wedding photography, and backdrops for corporate print advertising. The Lonely Planet travel guide cites Melbourne's street as a major attraction. All forms of graffiti, including sticker art, poster, stencil art, and wheatpasting, can be found in many places throughout the city. Prominent street art precincts include; Fitzroy, Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick, St. Kilda, and the CBD, where stencil and sticker art is prominent. As one moves farther away from the city, mostly along suburban train lines, graffiti tags become more prominent. Many international artists such as Banksy have left their work in Melbourne and in early 2008 a perspex screen was installed to prevent a Banksy stencil art piece from being destroyed, it has survived since 2003 through the respect of local street artists avoiding posting over it, although it has recently had paint tipped over it.
In February 2008 Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister at that time, announced a government crackdown on tagging and other forms of graffiti vandalism, describing it as a destructive crime representing an invasion of public and private property. New legislation subsequently adopted included a ban on the sale of paint spray cans to persons under 18 and increases in maximum fines for the offence from NZ$200 to NZ$2,000 or extended community service. The issue of tagging become a widely debated one following an incident in Auckland during January 2008 in which a middle-aged property owner stabbed one of two teenage taggers to death and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.
Graffiti databases have increased in the past decade because they allow vandalism incidents to be fully documented against an offender and help the police and prosecution charge and prosecute offenders for multiple counts of vandalism. They also provide law enforcement the ability to rapidly search for an offender's moniker or tag in a simple, effective, and comprehensive way. These systems can also help track costs of damage to a city to help allocate an anti-graffiti budget. The theory is that when an offender is caught putting up graffiti, they are not just charged with one count of vandalism; they can be held accountable for all the other damage for which they are responsible. This has two main benefits for law enforcement. One, it sends a signal to the offenders that their vandalism is being tracked. Two, a city can seek restitution from offenders for all the damage that they have committed, not merely a single incident. These systems give law enforcement personnel real-time, street-level intelligence that allows them not only to focus on the worst graffiti offenders and their damage, but also to monitor potential gang violence that is associated with the graffiti.
Many restrictions of civil gang injunctions are designed to help address and protect the physical environment and limit graffiti. Provisions of gang injunctions include things such as restricting the possession of marker pens, spray paint cans, or other sharp objects capable of defacing private or public property; spray painting, or marking with marker pens, scratching, applying stickers, or otherwise applying graffiti on any public or private property, including, but not limited to the street, alley, residences, block walls, and fences, vehicles or any other real or personal property. Some injunctions contain wording that restricts damaging or vandalizing both public and private property, including but not limited to any vehicle, light fixture, door, fence, wall, gate, window, building, street sign, utility box, telephone box, tree, or power pole.
To help address many of these issues, many local jurisdictions have set up graffiti abatement hotlines, where citizens can call in and report vandalism and have it removed. San Diego's hotline receives more than 5,000 calls per year, in addition to reporting the graffiti, callers can learn more about prevention. One of the complaints about these hotlines is the response time; there is often a lag time between a property owner calling about the graffiti and its removal. The length of delay should be a consideration for any jurisdiction planning on operating a hotline. Local jurisdictions must convince the callers that their complaint of vandalism will be a priority and cleaned off right away. If the jurisdiction does not have the resources to respond to complaints in a timely manner, the value of the hotline diminishes. Crews must be able to respond to individual service calls made to the graffiti hotline as well as focus on cleanup near schools, parks, and major intersections and transit routes to have the biggest impact. Some cities offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of suspects for tagging or graffiti related vandalism. The amount of the reward is based on the information provided, and the action taken.
When police obtain search warrants in connection with a vandalism investigation, they are often seeking judicial approval to look for items such as cans of spray paint and nozzles from other kinds of aerosol sprays; etching tools, or other sharp or pointed objects, which could be used to etch or scratch glass and other hard surfaces; permanent marking pens, markers, or paint sticks; evidence of membership or affiliation with any gang or tagging crew; paraphernalia including any reference to "(tagger's name)"; any drawings, writing, objects, or graffiti depicting taggers' names, initials, logos, monikers, slogans, or any mention of tagging crew membership; and any newspaper clippings relating to graffiti crime.
Thanks for the comments. Please don't use this image on websites, blogs or other media without my explicit written permission. copyright all rights reserved.
Please don't use my images on websites, blogs or other media without my explicit permission - rr.restifo@gmail.com. © All rights reserved.
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Da/from www.facebook.com/iononmilasciofregare/info/?tab=page_info:
IO NON MI LASCIO FREGARE
#iononmilasciofregare
Questo appello nasce dalla volontà di ricordare cosa è successo il 19 novembre 2015 a Verona...un appello che abbiamo scritto a più mani in maniera ANONIMA e che vuole essere una "chiamata alle armi" per amici artisti di buona volontà.
IN BREVE
Presso il Museo Civico di Castelvecchio sono state trafugate 17 opere di grandissimo valore: Tintoretto, Mantegna, Rubens solo per citare alcuni autori, in pratica un piccolo museo per intero (le foto delle opere rubate le trovate nel nostro album a questo indirizzo: www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1064799210228843.107374....)
L’operazione è durata quasi un’ora e mezza ed è stata condotta con molta tranquillità. Un vero scandalo! Poche le parole spese dai media in seguito all’accaduto, le Istituzioni hanno messo in scena il solito scaricabarili e la raccolta firme on-line ha avuto poco seguito.
Ma un pezzettino di quelle straordinarie opere è anche MIO, è ANCHE VOSTRO! Io rivoglio il nostro pezzettino di MANTEGNA, TINTORETTO, BELLINI, etc! Non so se ve ne siete accorti ma si stanno rubando il passato e soprattutto IL FUTURO!
Io non ci sto, noi non ci stiamo! Portiamo un segnale fuori, per le strade e in rete per tenere viva l’attenzione su questo caso letteralmente scomparso, senza lasciare traccia.
Ci rivolgiamo quindi agli amici artisti: quello che sappiamo fare è dipingere, non perdiamo tempo, facciamolo. L'idea che ci è venuta è di adottare ognuno di noi una delle 17 opere e di realizzare un murale (ma anche un poster o una qualsiasi installazione urbana) reinterpretando a modo nostro il lavoro originale. Sfrutteremo l'interesse dei media per l'arte urbana per poter denunciare ad alta voce insieme questo incredibile furto!
Vi chiediamo di farlo liberamente, ognuno con i propri mezzi, ognuno con le proprie capacità,
Siete invitati a partecipare tutti e di farlo in maniera ANONIMA senza firmare le opere che lascerete nelle nostre città, per far parlare direttamente i vari TINTORETTO, MANTEGNA, PISANIELLO ETC, coinvolgendo chi volete (le realtà che oggi hanno a disposizione spazi non mancano, quindi destinatarie di questo messaggio e di certo non abbiamo niente da insegnarvi su come si può fare arte per strada...).
Quando avete fatto mandateci le foto a questo indirizzo:
iononmilasciofregare@gmail.com
o postatele su questa pagina
www.facebook.com/iononmilasciofregare/
sarà nostra cura farle girare il più possibile perchè #iononmifacciofregare
Ecco la lista dei nostri 17 capolavori da adottare:
1 Antonio Pisano detto Pisanello, Madonna col bambino
2 Jacopo Bellini, San Girolamo penitente
3 Andrea Mantegna, Sacra Famiglia
4 Giovanni Francesco Caroto, Ritratto di giovane con disegno infantile
5 Giovanni Francesco Caroto, Ritratto di giovane monaco benedettino
6 Jacopo Tintoretto, Madonna allattante
7 Jacopo Tintoretto, Trasporto dell’arca dell’alleanza
8 Jacopo Tintoretto, Banchetto di Baltassar
9 Jacopo Tintoretto, Sansone
10 Jacopo Tintoretto, Giudizio di Salomone
11 Cerchia di Jacopo Tintoretto, Ritratto maschile
12 Domenico Tintoretto, Ritratto di Marco Pasqualigo
13 Bottega di Domenico Tintoretto, Ritratto di ammiraglio veneziano
14 Peter Paul Rubens, Dama delle licnidi
15 Hans de Jode, Paesaggio
16 Hans de Jode, Porto di mare
17 Giovanni Benini, Ritratto di Girolamo Pompei
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(eng)
I WON'T GET SCREWED OVER
# Iononmilasciofregare
This call arises from the desire to remember what happened on Nov. 19, 2015 in Verona, a call that we have written many hands in an ANONYMOUS way and that wants to be a "call of duty" for artist friends and people of good will.
THE FACT
17 works of great value were stolen from the Museum of Castelvecchio: Tintoretto, Mantegna, Rubens just to mention a few painters, basically a real small museum (photos of stolen works can be found in our album to this address: https: //www.facebook.com/media/set/....)
The operation lasted nearly an hour and a half and it was carried out with extreme calm. A real scandal! A few words spoken by the media after the incident, the institutions have staged the usual buck and the online sensibilization campaign has had little success.
A part of those extraordinary works is also MINE, is also YOURS! I want back our piece of MANTEGNA, TINTORETTO, BELLINI, etc! I do not know if you are aware of that but they are stealing our past and our FUTURE!
I do not accept it, do you? Let's transmit a signal on the streets and in the internet to keep attention focused on this case that risks to disappear without a trace.
We appeal to artist friends: what we do is painting, do not waste time, let's do it. The idea is to take each of us one of the 17 works and create a mural (or a poster or any urban installation) reinterpreting our own way the original work. Let's exploit the media interest in street art to denounce loud together this incredible theft!
We ask you to do it freely, each with their own means, each with their own abilities,
You are all invited to attend and do it in an ANONYMOUS way, without signing the works that you will leave in our cities, to speak directly to TINTORETTO, MANTEGNA, PISANELLO, etc, involving those who want to participate.
Once you did it, please send photos to this address:
iononmilasciofregare@gmail.com
or post them on this page
www.facebook.com/iononmilasciofregare/
We will spread them as much as possible, because:
I WON'T GET SCREWED OVER
"Nature rules without rules"
~ anonymous
for your listening pleasure... Moonlight Sonata
Composed by Ludwig van Beethoven
There was a full moon, there was some fog, and my Canon KissX2 with my 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens.
Without disturbing the position of the focus ring, rotate the outer sleeve until the guide pin hole aligns with the slot in the inner mount. Reinstall the guide pin.
Chimneys without a smoke. Series "From the train window". London, UK
Nellie Vin ©Photography
This borough and much of London suffers from poor air quality. In the past air pollution was mainly caused by factory fumes and unrestricted coal burning, giving rise to large quantities of thick smoke. This when combined with fog resulted in “Smogs” with many deaths; after one episode in 1952 12,000 Londoners died. The constant smoky atmosphere also caused widespread lung disease and breathing difficulties.
Today high average concentrations of fine particles from road traffic exhaust, building sites, industrial furnaces and chimney smoke continue to pose a significant risk to health. Estimates suggest that in London alone 5000 people are dying early by as much as ten years in some cases, and many more are suffering ill-health because of air pollution.
Can I burn a few logs as well as, or instead of, smokeless coal?
No you cannot burn wood, although a small amount of kindling, or timber wood can be used to light the fire.
While connecting through Frankfurt Airport I took this shot while passing through the tunnel between concourses B and A of Terminal 1.
Image Details:
-Camera: Ricoh GR II
-Exposure: 1/500 sec at f/6.3, ISO 25600 and 18,3mm (28mm in
35mm equivalent) focal length
-Equipment: handheld
-Postprocessing: Raw conversion in Lightroom
Please visit my street photography blog at www.streetsofnuremberg.com
My images are all copyrighted © All rights reserved. No usage allowed in any form without my written consent.
Let's do things differently this time. . . I thought I would put up this photo-collage without my usual accompanying text initially......I would love to hear the tale in your words before I pinch all of your hilarious words and pretend they are my own!!!
Ok, time to regale you:
I was barely aware that I had a radiator by the back door.
Now I know it a little more intimately.
I now have permanently stamped in my mind, and on my inner eye socket, the corner of that radiator.
I will never again have my shoes half on, tread on a rain-spattered glossy black back step, have my hands full of rocket.
‘That’s about £1.50 worth of rocket I’ve just dropped and now I’m going to spend the afternoon in casualty with no lunch, what a waste.’
I couldn’t pinpoint as I stood up post-trip where exactly the epi-centre of my injury was, I just felt a general haze of bashed-face-pain (I wonder if that is a category on webmd.com), so I staggered around looking for a mirror (how vain) and then realised that I was dripping blood all over the floor. It was a beautiful Cath Kidston red.
I deposited a great gollop from my cupped hands into the sink and then held up the mirror and took a look at myself – I saw a glimmer of puffy, grey face before a drip of blood on the glass obscured the view, the diagnosis was no more certain. Normally I’m too stingy to buy kitchen roll: thank goodness this week I had been feeling decadent. I wodged half the roll into my eye socket, tucked the rest under my arm – managed to retain enough OCD-ness to go round the house locking doors, closing windows and unplugging irons, grabbed my keys and set off to the next door neighbour walking like I was made of sweaty bone china.
Poor woman.
“Hello, I’m so sorry to bother you but I have bashed my face on the radiator and I’m just wondering if you could have a look at the damage.”
She welcomed me in, sat me down, her dog thrust a toy into my crotch, she hid her shocked looking children and peered at my wound. Ironically while she was doing this her son was scraping a stick up and down their own radiator - a most apt musical score to accompany the drama.
It is pretty remarkable in these fairly anti-social-keep-yourself-to-yourself times that we are able to go round to near-stranger’s home and get them to help us. Not for everything mind. If I had gone round and asked her to help me assemble some flat pack furniture she would probably have made her excuses, but thrust my bloody, clammy self upon her and she promptly gathered up her whole family and took me to one hospital after another without complaint, not even a "For f**ks sake bargain hunt is about to start, try number 45." She even provided me with a washing up bowl in case I was sick.
I think I may have permanently traumatized her three-year-old daughter though. From the moment she first saw me to the moment we parted company she never stopped looking in open-mouthed horror at me and my blood-soaked kitchen-roll-covered eye. She will either become a doctor after this or develop a phobia of kitchen roll.
`Is this eye casualty?
‘Aye, casualty’
Sitting in the waiting room I was a little disappointed. No one else had much to show for themselves, I was by far the most dramatic looking, and even I was feeling a bit lack-lustre given that I had dragged a whole family out with me and really only had the one petite ‘gash’. By this time the clammy wanting-to-puke up sensations had faded and I was now wallowing in a strangely euphoric feeling. Your body does such peculiar things when you hurt yourself, first it makes you feel worse than you already feel by throwing in nausea and shaking and breathlessness and a cold sweat and then it turns it all around and makes you feel as high as a kite as you sit in the waiting room. Maybe it does that so you are nice to the doctors and nurses and don’t mind the hours of waiting so much.
And why is it always the day that I am wearing my ‘at home clothes’ (camouflage trousers, a holey old jumper, white socks, big pants and black trainers) and haven’t had a shower that I have to be meeting more people than I would normally meet in a month?!
My iPhone came into it’s own as I sat waiting to be examined. I did that reverse camera thing and took a look at myself, live, on screen, in action. ‘God, is my nose broken?! Does it always look like that?’ It is only at this moment that I realise I never really look at my nose, I scrutinize it only when I think it might be broken, or if I’m checking for rogue bogies. Note to self: take a good look at nose on a day when it’s definitely not broken so you know how it normally appears.
The doctor told me that he had recently had two similar cases to mine of old ladies crashing into radiators and their eyes had been, and I think he actually used the term, ‘mashed up’ He grimaced and shuddered like a horror film extra.
I was told that it was all rather minor and that my eye was ok and that it was just the laceration – lovely word – that needed to be stitched up. I was expecting to be sat out in a corridor with someone on work experience attempting to sew me up, whilst having their elbows repeatedly knocked by porters wheeling post-op patients past us but no, I had the full-blown operating theatre procedure - I felt so indulged.
Anesthetic drops descended into my eyes, then came the anesthetic injections. Warned to expect great agony I braced myself, fists and buttocks clenched – It felt like kittens licking my eyelids compared to what I was expecting (clever ploy on the surgeon’s part). I unclenched my fists, but not my buttocks. My whole face was then swaddled in surgical greens with just the stricken eye poking out. They turned on the nuclear strength operating room lamp and I could almost kid myself that I was lying on a hot beach, sun beating down through my un-lacerated eyelids, or perhaps I was about to feature in an ocular fetish hospital themed porno. Bizarrely the operating room experience was extremely tranquil and pain free – the surgeon excused his skills stating that he was more used to stitching up corneas and that the thread he was using now felt most thick and cumbersome. I would rather hear that than that he was more used to stitching up elephants with rope after caesarians. The sound of my own heartbeat as a kind of metronome in the background was most surreal, when I braced myself for pain I heard the monitor start to beep faster. Distracted by the concept that I was providing the operating room soundtrack I started to try and slow my heart rate down and then suddenly speed it up to see if anyone would react. I was so engrossed in my heart rate I barely noticed the work being done to my face. Where can I get one for home use?
As I was wheeled out of the theatre I clocked the most immaculate storage shelf of folded surgical scrubs – the king or queen of OCD was alive and well at the Royal Berkshire, I wonder if it was that man from Sleeping with the Enemy? I had a terrific urge to yank out the bottom set of scrubs from the pile.
When I returned home, what was the first thing I did? Well as anyone would do, I photographed the accident scene imagining I was in CSI Ascot and then held my face over the radiator to try and work out which bit hit what and exactly how close I came to being the doctor’s third ‘mashed up eye’ tale. That’s standard isn’t it? Then of course I opened the wine, and the crisps – because calories aren’t absorbed for at least a week after you have had an accident.
For the next week my face changed colour daily and I found it rather fascinating watching people who had just met me take in my face and desperately try not to react. Were they imagining that I had burnt some domineering boyfriend’s egg and chips one night and been suitably punished? I would notice them subconsciously reach towards the corner of their eye and rub it whilst talking to me. The same way that you always check your own teeth with your tongue if you notice the person you are talking to has food in theirs. What if instead of my eye injury I had an enormous bandage over my crotch? Would people subconsciously start to cup their special, secret places as they talked to me?!
Photo Copyright 2012, dynamo.photography.
All rights reserved, no use without license
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Hong kong)
Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, is an autonomous territory south to Mainland China and east to Macao in East Asia. With around 7.2 million Hong Kongers of various nationalities[note 2] in a territory of 1,104 km2, Hong Kong is the world's fourth most densely populated country or territory.
Hong Kong used to be a British colony with the perpetual cession of Hong Kong Island from the Qing Empire after the First Opium War (1839–42). The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 and acquired a 99-year lease of the New Territories from 1898. Hong Kong was later occupied by Japan during the Second World War until British control resumed in 1945. The Sino-British Joint Declaration signed between the United Kingdom and China in 1984 paved way for the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong in 1997, when it became a special administrative region (SAR) of the People's Republic of China with a high degree of autonomy.[15]
Under the principle of "one country, two systems",[16][17] Hong Kong maintains a separate political and economic system from China. Except in military defence and foreign affairs, Hong Kong maintains its independent executive, legislative and judiciary powers.[18] In addition, Hong Kong develops relations directly with foreign states and international organisations in a broad range of "appropriate fields".[19] Hong Kong involves in international organizations, such as the WTO[20] and the APEC [21], actively and independently.
Hong Kong is one of the world's most significant financial centres, with the highest Financial Development Index score and consistently ranks as the world's most competitive and freest economic entity.[22][23] As the world's 8th largest trading entity,[24] its legal tender, the Hong Kong dollar, is the world's 13th most traded currency.[25] As the world's most visited city,[26][27] Hong Kong's tertiary sector dominated economy is characterised by competitive simple taxation and supported by its independent judiciary system.[28] Even with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, it suffers from severe income inequality.[29]
Nicknamed "Pearl of the Orient", Hong Kong is renowned for its deep natural harbour, which boasts the world's fifth busiest port with ready access by cargo ships, and its impressive skyline, with the most skyscrapers in the world.[30][31] It has a very high Human Development Index ranking and the world's longest life expectancy.[32][33] Over 90% of the population makes use of well-developed public transportation.[34][35] Seasonal air pollution with origins from neighbouring industrial areas of Mainland China, which adopts loose emissions standards, has resulted in a high level of atmospheric particulates in winter.[36][37][38]
Contents
1 Etymology
2 History
2.1 Prehistory
2.2 Imperial China
2.3 British Crown Colony: 1842–1941
2.4 Japanese occupation: 1941–45
2.5 Resumption of British rule and industrialisation: 1945–97
2.6 Handover and Special Administrative Region status
3 Governance
3.1 Structure of government
3.2 Electoral and political reforms
3.3 Legal system and judiciary
3.4 Foreign relations
3.5 Human rights
3.6 Regions and districts
3.7 Military
4 Geography and climate
5 Economy
5.1 Financial centre
5.2 International trading
5.3 Tourism and expatriation
5.4 Policy
5.5 Infrastructure
6 Demographics
6.1 Languages
6.2 Religion
6.3 Personal income
6.4 Education
6.5 Health
7 Culture
7.1 Sports
7.2 Architecture
7.3 Cityscape
7.4 Symbols
8 See also
9 Notes
10 References
10.1 Citations
10.2 Sources
11 Further reading
12 External links
Etymology
Hong Kong was officially recorded in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking to encompass the entirety of the island.[39]
The source of the romanised name "Hong Kong" is not known, but it is generally believed to be an early imprecise phonetic rendering of the pronunciation in spoken Cantonese 香港 (Cantonese Yale: Hēung Góng), which means "Fragrant Harbour" or "Incense Harbour".[13][14][40] Before 1842, the name referred to a small inlet—now Aberdeen Harbour (Chinese: 香港仔; Cantonese Yale: Hēunggóng jái), literally means "Little Hong Kong"—between Aberdeen Island and the southern coast of Hong Kong Island. Aberdeen was an initial point of contact between British sailors and local fishermen.[41]
Another theory is that the name would have been taken from Hong Kong's early inhabitants, the Tankas (水上人); it is equally probable that romanisation was done with a faithful execution of their speeches, i.e. hōng, not hēung in Cantonese.[42] Detailed and accurate romanisation systems for Cantonese were available and in use at the time.[43]
Fragrance may refer to the sweet taste of the harbour's fresh water estuarine influx of the Pearl River or to the incense from factories lining the coast of northern Kowloon. The incense was stored near Aberdeen Harbour for export before Hong Kong developed Victoria Harbour.[40]
The name had often been written as the single word Hongkong until the government adopted the current form in 1926.[44] Nevertheless, a number of century-old institutions still retain the single-word form, such as the Hongkong Post, Hongkong Electric and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.
As of 1997, its official name is the "Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China". This is the official title as mentioned in the Hong Kong Basic Law and the Hong Kong Government's website;[45] however, "Hong Kong Special Administrative Region" and "Hong Kong" are widely accepted.
Hong Kong has carried many nicknames. The most famous among those is the "Pearl of the Orient", which reflected the impressive nightscape of the city's light decorations on the skyscrapers along both sides of the Victoria Harbour. The territory is also known as "Asia's World City".
History
Main articles: History of Hong Kong and History of China
Prehistory
Main article: Prehistoric Hong Kong
Archaeological studies support human presence in the Chek Lap Kok area (now Hong Kong International Airport) from 35,000 to 39,000 years ago and on Sai Kung Peninsula from 6,000 years ago.[46][47][48]
Wong Tei Tung and Three Fathoms Cove are the earliest sites of human habitation in Hong Kong during the Paleolithic Period. It is believed that the Three Fathom Cove was a river-valley settlement and Wong Tei Tung was a lithic manufacturing site. Excavated Neolithic artefacts suggested cultural differences from the Longshan culture of northern China and settlement by the Che people, prior to the migration of the Baiyue to Hong Kong.[49][50] Eight petroglyphs, which dated to the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600 BC – 1066 BC) in China, were discovered on the surrounding islands.[51]
Imperial China
Main article: History of Hong Kong under Imperial China
In 214 BC, Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a centralised China, conquered the Baiyue tribes in Jiaozhi (modern-day Liangguang region and Vietnam) and incorporated the area of Hong Kong into his imperial China for the first time. Hong Kong proper was assigned to the Nanhai commandery (modern-day Nanhai District), near the commandery's capital city Panyu.[52][53][54]
After a brief period of centralisation and collapse of the Qin dynasty, the area of Hong Kong was consolidated under the Kingdom of Nanyue, founded by general Zhao Tuo in 204 BC.[55] When Nanyue lost the Han-Nanyue War in 111 BC, Hong Kong came under the Jiaozhi commandery of the Han dynasty. Archaeological evidence indicates an increase of population and flourish of salt production. The Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb on the Kowloon Peninsula is believed to have been built as a burial site during the Han dynasty.[56]
From the Han dynasty to the early Tang dynasty, Hong Kong was a part of Bao'an County. In the Tang dynasty, modern-day Guangzhou (Canton) flourished as an international trading centre. In 736, the Emperor Xuanzong of Tang established a military stronghold in Tuen Mun to strengthen defence of the coastal area.[57] The nearby Lantau Island was a salt production centre and salt smuggler riots occasionally broke out against the government. In c. 1075, The first village school, Li Ying College, was established around 1075 AD in modern-day New Territories by the Northern Song dynasty.[58] During their war against the Mongols, the imperial court of Southern Song was briefly stationed at modern-day Kowloon City (the Sung Wong Toi site) before their ultimate defeat by the Mongols at the Battle of Yamen in 1279.[59] The Mongols then established their dynastic court and governed Hong Kong for 97 years.
From the mid-Tang dynasty to the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Hong Kong was a part of Dongguan County. During the Ming dynasty, the area was transferred to Xin'an County. The indigenous inhabitants at that time consisted of several ethnicities such as Punti, Hakka, Tanka and Hoklo.
European discovery
The earliest European visitor on record was Jorge Álvares, a Portuguese explorer, who arrived in 1513.[60][61] Having established a trading post in a site they called "Tamão" in Hong Kong waters, Portuguese merchants commenced with regular trading in southern China. Subsequent military clashes between China and Portugal, however, led to the expulsion of all Portuguese merchants from southern China.
Since the 14th century, the Ming court had enforced the maritime prohibition laws that strictly forbade all private maritime activities in order to prevent contact with foreigners by sea.[62] When the Manchu Qing dynasty took over China, Hong Kong was directly affected by the Great Clearance decree of the Kangxi Emperor, who ordered the evacuation of coastal areas of Guangdong from 1661 to 1669. Over 16,000 inhabitants of Xin'an County including those in Hong Kong were forced to migrate inland; only 1,648 of those who had evacuated subsequently returned.[63][64]
British Crown Colony: 1842–1941
A painter at work. John Thomson. Hong Kong, 1871. The Wellcome Collection, London
Main articles: British Hong Kong and History of Hong Kong (1800s–1930s)
In 1839, threats by the imperial court of Qing to sanction opium imports caused diplomatic friction with the British Empire. Tensions escalated into the First Opium War. The Qing admitted defeat when British forces captured Hong Kong Island on 20 January 1841. The island was initially ceded under the Convention of Chuenpi as part of a ceasefire agreement between Captain Charles Elliot and Governor Qishan. A dispute between high-ranking officials of both countries, however, led to the failure of the treaty's ratification. On 29 August 1842, Hong Kong Island was formally ceded in perpetuity to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the Treaty of Nanking.[65] The British officially established a Crown colony and founded the City of Victoria in the following year.[66]
The population of Hong Kong Island was 7,450 when the Union Flag raised over Possession Point on 26 January 1841. It mostly consisted of Tanka fishermen and Hakka charcoal burners, whose settlements scattered along several coastal hamlets. In the 1850s, a large number of Chinese immigrants crossed the then-free border to escape from the Taiping Rebellion. Other natural disasters, such as flooding, typhoons and famine in mainland China would play a role in establishing Hong Kong as a place for safe shelter.[67][68]
Further conflicts over the opium trade between Britain and Qing quickly escalated into the Second Opium War. Following the Anglo-French victory, the Crown Colony was expanded to include Kowloon Peninsula (south of Boundary Street) and Stonecutter's Island, both of which were ceded to the British in perpetuity under the Convention of Beijing in 1860.
In 1898, Britain obtained a 99-year lease from Qing under the Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory, in which Hong Kong obtained a 99-year lease of Lantau Island, the area north of Boundary Street in Kowloon up to Shenzhen River and over 200 other outlying islands.[69][70][71]
Hong Kong soon became a major entrepôt thanks to its free port status, attracting new immigrants to settle from both China and Europe. The society, however, remained racially segregated and polarised under early British colonial policies. Despite the rise of a British-educated Chinese upper-class by the late-19th century, race laws such as the Peak Reservation Ordinance prevented ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong from acquiring houses in reserved areas such as Victoria Peak. At this time, the majority of the Chinese population in Hong Kong had no political representation in the British colonial government. The British governors did rely, however, on a small number of Chinese elites, including Sir Kai Ho and Robert Hotung, who served as ambassadors and mediators between the government and local population.
File:1937 Hong Kong VP8.webmPlay media
Hong Kong filmed in 1937
In 1904, the United Kingdom established the world's first border and immigration control; all residents of Hong Kong were given citizenship as Citizens of United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKC).
Hong Kong continued to experience modest growth during the first half of the 20th century. The University of Hong Kong was established in 1911 as the territory's first higher education institute. While there had been an exodus of 60,000 residents for fear of a German attack on the British colony during the First World War, Hong Kong remained unscathed. Its population increased from 530,000 in 1916 to 725,000 in 1925 and reached 1.6 million by 1941.[72]
In 1925, Cecil Clementi became the 17th Governor of Hong Kong. Fluent in Cantonese and without a need for translator, Clementi introduced the first ethnic Chinese, Shouson Chow, into the Executive Council as an unofficial member. Under Clementi's tenure, Kai Tak Airport entered operation as RAF Kai Tak and several aviation clubs. In 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out when the Japanese Empire expanded its territories from northeastern China into the mainland proper. To safeguard Hong Kong as a freeport, Governor Geoffry Northcote declared the Crown Colony as a neutral zone.
Japanese occupation: 1941–45
Main article: Japanese occupation of Hong Kong
The Cenotaph in Hong Kong commemorates those who died in service in the First World War and the Second World War.[73]
As part of its military campaign in Southeast Asia during Second World War, the Japanese army moved south from Guangzhou of mainland China and attacked Hong Kong in on 8 December 1941.[74] Crossing the border at Shenzhen River on 8 December, the Battle of Hong Kong lasted for 18 days when British and Canadian forces held onto Hong Kong Island. Unable to defend against intensifying Japanese air and land bombardments, they eventually surrendered control of Hong Kong on 25 December 1941. The Governor of Hong Kong was captured and taken as a prisoner of war. This day is regarded by the locals as "Black Christmas".[75]
During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, the Japanese army committed atrocities against civilians and POWs, such as the St. Stephen's College massacre. Local residents also suffered widespread food shortages, limited rationing and hyper-inflation arising from the forced exchange of currency from Hong Kong dollars to Japanese military banknotes. The initial ratio of 2:1 was gradually devalued to 4:1 and ownership of Hong Kong dollars was declared illegal and punishable by harsh torture. Due to starvation and forced deportation for slave labour to mainland China, the population of Hong Kong had dwindled from 1.6 million in 1941 to 600,000 in 1945, when the United Kingdom resumed control of the colony on 2 September 1945.[76]
Resumption of British rule and industrialisation: 1945–97
Main articles: British Hong Kong, 1950s in Hong Kong, 1960s in Hong Kong, 1970s in Hong Kong, 1980s in Hong Kong, and 1990s in Hong Kong
Flag of British Hong Kong from 1959 to 1997
Hong Kong's population recovered quickly after the war, as a wave of skilled migrants from the Republic of China moved in to seek refuge from the Chinese Civil War. When the Communist Party eventually took full control of mainland China in 1949, even more skilled migrants fled across the open border for fear of persecution.[69] Many newcomers, especially those who had been based in the major port cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou, established corporations and small- to medium-sized businesses and shifted their base operations to British Hong Kong.[69] The establishment of a socialist state in China (People's Republic of China) on 1 October 1949 caused the British colonial government to reconsider Hong Kong's open border to mainland China. In 1951, a boundary zone was demarked as a buffer zone against potential military attacks from communist China. Border posts along the north of Hong Kong began operation in 1953 to regulate the movement of people and goods into and out of the territory.
Stamp with portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, 1953
In the 1950s, Hong Kong became the first of the Four Asian Tiger economies under rapid industrialisation driven by textile exports, manufacturing industries and re-exports of goods to China. As the population grew, with labour costs remaining low, living standards began to rise steadily.[77] The construction of the Shek Kip Mei Estate in 1953 marked the beginning of the public housing estate programme to provide shelter for the less privileged and to cope with the influx of immigrants.
Under Sir Murray MacLehose, 25th Governor of Hong Kong (1971–82), a series of reforms improved the public services, environment, housing, welfare, education and infrastructure of Hong Kong. MacLehose was British Hong Kong's longest-serving governor and, by the end of his tenure, had become one of the most popular and well-known figures in the Crown Colony. MacLehose laid the foundation for Hong Kong to establish itself as a key global city in the 1980s and early 1990s.
A sky view of Hong Kong Island
An aerial view of the northern shore of Hong Kong Island in 1986
To resolve traffic congestion and to provide a more reliable means of crossing the Victoria Harbour, a rapid transit railway system (metro), the MTR, was planned from the 1970s onwards. The Island Line (Hong Kong Island), Kwun Tong Line (Kowloon Peninsula and East Kowloon) and Tsuen Wan Line (Kowloon and urban New Territories) opened in the early 1980s.[78]
In 1983, the Hong Kong dollar left its 16:1 peg with the Pound sterling and switched to the current US-HK Dollar peg. Hong Kong's competitiveness in manufacturing gradually declined due to rising labour and property costs, as well as new development in southern China under the Open Door Policy introduced in 1978 which opened up China to foreign business. Nevertheless, towards the early 1990s, Hong Kong had established itself as a global financial centre along with London and New York City, a regional hub for logistics and freight, one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia and the world's exemplar of Laissez-faire market policy.[79]
The Hong Kong question
In 1971, the Republic of China (Taiwan)'s permanent seat on the United Nations was transferred to the People's Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong's status as a recognised colony became terminated in 1972 under the request of PRC. Facing the uncertain future of Hong Kong and expiry of land lease of New Territories beyond 1997, Governor MacLehose raised the question in the late 1970s.
The British Nationality Act 1981 reclassified Hong Kong into a British Dependent Territory amid the reorganisation of global territories of the British Empire. All residents of Hong Kong became British Dependent Territory Citizens (BDTC). Diplomatic negotiations began with China and eventually concluded with the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. Both countries agreed to transfer Hong Kong's sovereignty to China on 1 July 1997, when Hong Kong would remain autonomous as a special administrative region and be able to retain its free-market economy, British common law through the Hong Kong Basic Law, independent representation in international organisations (e.g. WTO and WHO), treaty arrangements and policy-making except foreign diplomacy and military defence.
It stipulated that Hong Kong would retain its laws and be guaranteed a high degree of autonomy for at least 50 years after the transfer. The Hong Kong Basic Law, based on English law, would serve as the constitutional document after the transfer. It was ratified in 1990.[69] The expiry of the 1898 lease on the New Territories in 1997 created problems for business contracts, property leases and confidence among foreign investors.
Handover and Special Administrative Region status
Main articles: Transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong and 2000s in Hong Kong
Transfer of sovereignty
Golden Bauhinia Square
On 1 July 1997, the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China took place, officially marking the end of Hong Kong's 156 years under British colonial governance. As the largest remaining colony of the United Kingdom, the loss of Hong Kong effectively represented the end of the British Empire. This transfer of sovereignty made Hong Kong the first special administrative region of China. Tung Chee-Hwa, a pro-Beijing business tycoon, was elected Hong Kong's first Chief Executive by a selected electorate of 800 in a televised programme.
Structure of government
Hong Kong's current structure of governance inherits from the British model of colonial administration set up in the 1850s. The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration states that "Hong Kong should enjoy a high degree of autonomy in all areas except defence and foreign affairs" with reference to the underlying principle of one country, two systems.[note 3] This Declaration stipulates that Hong Kong maintains her capitalist economic system and guarantees the rights and freedoms of her people for at least 50 years after the 1997 handover. [note 4] Such guarantees are enshrined in the Hong Kong's Basic Law, the territory's constitutional document, which outlines the system of governance after 1997, albeit subject to interpretation by China's Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPCSC).[95][96]
Hong Kong's most senior leader, Chief Executive, is elected by a committee of 1,200 selected members (600 in 1997) and nominally appointed by the Government of China. The primary pillars of government are the Executive Council, Legislative Council, civil service and Judiciary.
Policy-making is initially discussed in the Executive Council, presided by the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, before passing to the Legislative Council for bill adoption. The Executive Council consists of 30 official/unofficial members appointed by the Chief Executive and one member among them acts as the convenor.[97][98]
The Legislative Council, set up in 1843, debates policies and motions before voting to adopt or rejecting bills. It has 70 members (originally 60) and 40 (originally 30) among them are directly elected by universal suffrage; the other 30 members are "functional constituencies" (indirectly) elected by a smaller electorate of corporate bodies or representatives of stipulated economic sectors as defined by the government. The Legislative Council is chaired by a president who acts as the speaker.[99][100]
In 1997, seating of the Legislative Council (also public services and election franchises) of Hong Kong modelled on the British system: Urban Council (Hong Kong and Kowloon) and District Council (New Territories and Outlying Islands). In 1999, this system has been reformed into 18 directly elected District Offices across 5 Legislative Council constituencies: Hong Kong Island (East/West), Kowloon and New Territories (East/West); the remaining outlying islands are divided across the aforementioned regions.
Hong Kong's Civil Service, created by the British colonial government, is a politically neutral body that implements government policies and provides public services. Senior civil servants are appointed based on meritocracy. The territory's police, firefighting and customs forces, as well as clerical officers across various government departments, make up the civil service.[101][102]
“Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one, is a life diminished.”
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Laddie enjoying the last rays of the sun in Llanfairfechan, North Wales.
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