Street World: Urban Culture and Art from Five Continents
Ever since hip-hop and punk music rose from the ashes of urban blight to become two of the most potent youth culture movements of the twentieth century, the world's streets have taken center stage as vibrant sites of creativity. And in less than a generation, thanks to ease of travel and the Internet, a new global street culture has emerged, bringing all of the world's diverse subcultures and modes of urban expression together: graffiti, skateboarding and bike messengering, DJing, offbeat...
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Ever since hip-hop and punk music rose from the ashes of urban blight to become two of the most potent youth culture movements of the twentieth century, the world's streets have taken center stage as vibrant sites of creativity. And in less than a generation, thanks to ease of travel and the Internet, a new global street culture has emerged, bringing all of the world's diverse subcultures and modes of urban expression together: graffiti, skateboarding and bike messengering, DJing, offbeat fashion, gang life, music, as well as design, photography, and other more traditional visual art. Street World: Urban Culture and Art from Five Continents is the first book to record the whole phenomenon. From New York and Los Angeles to the Brazilian mega-cities, South African townships, and Mumbai, authors Roger Gastman, Caleb Neelon, and Anthony Smyrski highlight cultural hotspots around the world. Divided into more than 50 topics and illustrated with more than 500 photographs, this book celebrates the street as a stage for the visual creativity of a generation.The Barnes & Noble Review"The Street finds its own uses for things," William Gibson noted in 1989. Nearly 20 years later, the editors of Street World substantiate his observation by enlisting nearly 100 photographers to compile eye-popping visual evidence of their transnational urban culture -- at once homogenous and geographically idiosyncratic -- that exists outside and beyond the media-dominated, commodified discourse. Graffiti artists, street performers, musicians, fashionistas, skateboarders, lowriders, motorcycle clubbers, shantytown dwellers, and juvenile cliques mix in a global stew of home-grown, amateur, lowbrow trends, fads, and creative modes of expression, which continuously bubbles and churns beneath our noses, tossing up bits and pieces that get co-opted by the for-profit mainstream. With the United Nations recently reporting that this year will see, for the first time in history, fully half the world's population living in urban environments, such unmapped territory can only assume ever-greater prominence. Street World attempts to be comprehensive but remains a scattershot, incomplete cartography of this brave new world. No preliminary editorial plan of coverage is evident. Rather, the book seems to have been assembled along the lines of "the things one hundred cool photographers found interesting, subsequently sorted into loose categories." Consequently, large areas of the globe -- China, most notably -- go unexplored, as do whole subcultures that justifiably deserve attention (live-action role-playing games, flash mobs). But the imagery and information that is included possess a journalistic vividness that will delight and astonish. Humanity's unquenchable creativity and need for self-expression elude all corporate trammels, and Street World embodies the anarchic spirit of its subject with both elegance and charming rudeness. --Paul DiFilippo
