This film explores the motives, influences and meanings behind graffiti art through street interviews with graffiti artists at the Eurocultured Street Art festival in Manchester 2007.

I was looking for something to present at a visual sociology conference and decided to try to carry out a rapid research study on graffiti based around video interviews. The whole thing worked well for me. I had about two hours to do the interviews and it took a further week to edit the film.

The editing process made me realise just how subjective  research papers really are. Somehow, the whole process of trying to make the film visually interesting and suited to the topic reminded me of the way that more orthodox conference papers and journal articles are shaped and reinterpreted  to fit their audience. There is little point in doing research f you don’t get it published.  So, even the most orthodox scientific paper has to follow journal and disciplinary conventions and these conventions shape the style and content of the paper. It’s not really a ‘ truth’ that you get in the published version, just a version of the truth directed at a specific audience, in most case the the two oe three people who review the original submission and then pull it apart and ask you to write it again.

This film was first screened at the International Visual Sociology Conference in New York, August, 2007.

Devised, filmed and edited by Vincent O’Brien

Translation Gonzalo Araoz

Music Vincent O’Brien