Five Cities

Acclaimed British photographer Nicholas Sinclair here looks at five European cities - Paris, Istanbul, Palermo, Berlin, and Budapest - through their surface markings. Exploring the interaction between a city and its citizens as recorded by graffiti and advertising, Sinclair's photographs occupy a place between documentary and abstraction - a scrawled word or the scrap of a flyer are at once physical scars on a wall and marks hovering graphically on the picture plane. In this beautifully produced book, the second in a trilogy by Sinclair examining the surfaces of European cities, readers are invited to look at graffiti and other "unofficial" interventions anew: not as aggressive intrusions, but rather as part of an ongoing collaborative project to interpret the modern city.