Whitebook 01 – It’s A Circle By Mark Grokenberger

Description

Book: It’s A circle
Author: Mark Grokenberger
Hardcover
Published: 2025
Pages: 225
Language: English
Dimensions: 31,5 x 21 x 3 cm.

The WHITEBOOK series focuses on documentation and photography in the field of graffiti and train writing. Books from this feature portfolios and essays from the community and showcasing completed projects.

The first book in this series is a kind of diary by the German photographer Mark Grokenberger, who is also a graffiti artist. For this project, he visited the Big Apple, the birthplace of New York Subway-inspired graffiti, ten times. This form of graffiti originated in the early 1970s and has since evolved into a vibrant, progressive, and global subculture over the past 55 years. Many graffiti artists from around the world make a pilgrimage there every year to find inspiration and to be active in the place where it all began, and to participate in something they themselves have been meticulously involved in for many years. Mark has chronicled this process in textual and photographic form, straddling the genres of diary and cultural essay. This narrative transcends the mere account of a German graffiti writer venturing into the expansive New York City underground in pursuit of historical parallels to his own longstanding pursuits. It is a narrative of maturation, creative expression, passion, and niche exploration, a narrative that delves into the mastery of an artistic form as ancient as humanity itself, a creative engagement with public and semi-public spaces from a singular vantage point.

This narrative epitomizes the cultural-historical inquiries that have preoccupied us here at ILOVEGRAFFITI.DE for many years: the trajectory of thousands of graffiti writers, the fate of their creative impulses once they recognize the cyclical nature of their pursuits.