WA 7 rough

Adam was a journalist and photographer working for the local newspaper. Or at least he was for now. Last Tuesday his editor mentioned that his stories were flat and uninteresting. His editor suggested Adam should find a more interesting topic, something more artistic and something that the local crowd didn’t know about or understand.

It was a Saturday and Adam’s deadline was in 10 hours. But procrastinating and working under pressure was something Adam did well. He scheduled the first three hours to find an interesting topic. This time he took a different approach and decided to walk around the small town and hopeful be inspired by something. So Adam took the trolley downtown to a place like he did everyday to work. But this time when he got off the trolley, instead of turning right onto the road where houses were known to be expensive and spacious, he walked straight onto a small street he had never been on.

Strolling down the street Adam looked around and felt totally different from he usually did on the perpendicular street. He was uncomfortable, the unkempt houses and messy trashed neighborhood made him feel insecure. Here he was determined to find something interesting. Old abandoned buildings broken glass and dumpsters.

He was truly inspired when he turned down an alley and saw a huge drawing on the building. Vandalism, he thought was such a terrible thing, why do people do that? What did it say? Adam backed up and looked at it again. He looked down the side of the building, covered in a graffiti mural. Bold colors stood out on the dull, cracking concrete building. Inch by inch foot by foot Adam inspected the mural. He looked at all the messages, illegible, obscene and the ones in various languages. There was a story behind each writing, symbol and scribble.

As he reached the end of the wall and looked at his watch, he was surprised to find out that it had already been two hours since he had left his apartment. Immediately he started worrying, he needed to get a good picture and subject soon. How silly he realized he was when he came back to his senses and realized a story was already written for him among the mural in front of him. The interpretive art form with such feeling behind it. That which most people saw and recognized as vandalism.

Adam returned home, 30 minutes ahead of schedule for once and developed his pictures. He sat down and poured out the story of his adventure. He looked at his photos, reinterpreted the drawings and fought on the side of the artists, like he was. Every form of art, he wrote, should be expressed freely and if this art required a wall then a wall should be available. He proposed the idea of a wall in a popular place downtown where people could draw what they wanted to.

When the article was published that week, many people started to look at graffiti in a different way and agreed about the idea of a public wall for graffiti. In a few months, sure enough, there was a wall covered in graffiti and stories that anyone could enjoy.