Nicholas Sinclair: Five Cities

These images represent 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, Sinclairs photographs occupy a place between documentary and abstraction a scrawled word or the scrap of a fly-poster 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, we 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.