When photographer Jon Naar set out to document the graffiti movement in New York circa 1972, the city was a far cry from the artisanal frozen yogurt and ultra-thick gourmet burger hub that it is today. The once mighty metropolis was a collapsing circus tent ripe with financial misery, urban decay, and of course those gawdawful Mets. Union Square–now the centre of kitschy Obama knick knacks and Bobby Flay throwdowns–was an outdoor drug-den, where pushers and poppers replaced the farmers and picklers that make up the square’s current commercial set.

Amidst all the chaos, Naar–a photojournalist who had shot for The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, and IBM–was enlisted by British design firm Pentagram, to capture the rash of graffiti that had exploded across the five boroughs, most noticeably in the subterranean underbelly of New York City’s subway system. That same year, Village Voice reporter Vivian Gornick described the decrepit scene down below:

“The platform was indescribably filthy; the tile walls surrounding the staircases were streaked with years-old dirt and the graffiti of a thousand greasy marker pens: Johnny and Velda, ’69; The Jets Was Here; Lindsay Sucks; Tony and Maureen, ’71; Benny and Concita Forever; Loreen Is a Cunt; The Black Hawks Can Beat the Shit Outta the Silver Eagles Anytime. The floor was littered with the overflow of the trash cans that stood vaguely about: candy wrappers, orange peels, leaky milk cartons, prophylactic wrappers, torn nylon stockings, pellets of chewing gum, discarded junk mail, globbets of spit. The lights in the ceiling were crusted over with webs of dirt that threatened, momentarily, to fall onto the heads of the passengers.”

It was a veritable war zone; on one side the unionized gatekeepers of the MTA, hired by the city to protect whatever integrity their crumbling subway system had left, and on the other, the young generals born of economic strife, leading the charge of what New York Magazine’s Richard Goldstein called “the first genuine teenage street culture since the fifties.” Naar spent ten days on the front lines at the end of 1972, shooting 100 rolls of Kodachrome for a book that would become the seminal document of the graffiti movement: The Faith of Graffiti. With an essay by Norman Mailer providing an intellectual anchor, the reissued tome is now thirty years old and just as relevant.

Mailer’s words helped legitimize the still nascent art form, which was generally frowned upon by the city’s hoi polloi. “Graffiti, the language of the anonymous, provokes and demands that an indifferent world recognize the individuality, talent, and existence of its creators,” wrote Mailer. These creators were generally youth of colour, a distinction that lent itself to the vitriol of New York’s upper crust and authorities. Naar and Mailer’s book helped plant the seeds of change.

While capturing the guerilla artists in action, Naar empathized with his subjects, and even managed to find beauty in their work. “I was essentially non-judgmental. As a photographer my pictures should really speak for themselves. I did have a sympathy for these kids. The majority were black, Puerto Rican, and they were mostly from the ghettos. They worked in gangs, and in groups, and I was excited and still am by this form of outsider art,” he says, over the phone from his home in New Jersey. “I’m a photojournalist. I have to go into a subject with an open mind.”

According to New York’s policy makers, the city was under assault; not by grizzly gangsters with pistols, but by agile kids with spray cans. The back cover of Faith’s reissue (which includes 32 new photos from Naar) features a telling portrait of several taggers, each holding up their respective identities or “tags” wildly scribbled on place cards accompanied by a mischievous smile. “I lived on East 50th street in Manhattan and I took a train to Harlem because I figured that’s where the Graffiti was going to be,” says Naar of the portrait. “The book’s designer and I got out at 155th street station and there on the platform were a bunch of kids. They came up to me because I had two cameras, and as a New Yorker I was hardly threatened at 2 PM by a bunch of kids. They said ‘Hey there nice cameras, what are you doing?’ and I told them, and they started laughing. ‘We are graffiti writers’.”

The next ten days, Naar describes as thrilling. “I was in no great danger because I didn’t really hang around a lot at night, but we were frequently chased and harassed by the MTA police and regular NYC cops,” he says. “These kids took tremendous risks.”

The pivotal taggers from that bygone era are now middle aged men, and Mr. Naar is well into his seventies. Some are eager to distance themselves from their work, while others use it to make a buck, sometimes with Naar’s assistance. Clearly the man has a fondness for the good old days. “Most of the graffiti in New York has been cleaned up but you can still find it. But coming in on the train, the railroad lines are full of the most incredible graffiti. It has evolved dramatically. It’s much more convoluted and baroque. But I personally love the simplicity of the tag. I like retro,” he says. “It captured the zeitgeist of the time. The spirit of the time and place.”

-Daniel Barna

(Photos courtesy of Jon Naar)