From Publishers Weekly
Almost every artist's face in this 71/2"×101/4" collection of 96 hot-looking four-color portraits (with a few more in b&w) is obscured in some way, reminding us that while some may see these writers as artists, many others, including the police, perceive them as criminals. It's an apt irony for an art form (one still hotly debated as such) that is all about identity and its "tags," placed in inaccessible locations and under trying circumstances. So when an artist among these leathered and t-shirted urban verbal guerillas here decides to bare his or her face (an act of bravery, or bravado?), it's a shock; each artist is more fully represented by his or her unique "autograf" (or tag) perfectly scrawled in thick glossy marker over each shot. REVS, whose huge white block letters are familiar to most New Yorkers, provides a (nicely reproduced) handwritten text on yellow legal paper, complete with misspellings, underlinings and exclamation points: "We need to be paintin 5, 10, 20 story buildings top to bottom with somethin to say... where none of these people in power... can discount your existence!" This terrific books shows its subjects in full effect (if in full stealth mode) with their canvas—New York's five boroughs—sprawled out beautifully and variously behind them, and their names.
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Synopsis
Essays by REVS and Stephen ESPO Powers. With an eye for style, Sutherland captures all of the gritty glory and glamour of the graffiti world and its warriors. Collected for the first time in Autograf, he presents a never-before-seen chronicle of the people and places that populate New York's famed graf scene. Featuring old-school legends COPE 2, FUTURA, STAY HIGH 149 and DOZE, as well as new-school writers SACE, EARSNOT, SERF, RATE, CINIK and UFO, among many others, each one of the 53 portraits is authentically tagged by the individual artists.