December 20, 2017

Social Media #12
Lisbon, Portugal
2017

When I travel somewhere for any extended period of time, I of course take lots of photos. I generally start with no preconceived photographic themes for the trip. Instead, I just arrive and start shooting whatever attracts my attention. Most times though, a specific subject will start to stand out and become a theme I then follow most. For Lisbon, it seems that theme is going to be graffiti and the associated stickers, posters etc. found on the walls of the city.

Once source on Lisbon said to be sure not to miss the graffiti here. It turns out you’d have to be blind to not see graffiti. Except in a few of the main shopping areas it is everywhere, often layers on layers of it extending as high as you can easily reach. In fact it quite often goes even higher. It’s existence seems to be quite tolerated and perhaps even encouraged in some forms to some degree.

Most of the graffiti is ignorable noise (subject-wise, certainly not in terms of visibility) but often I see something that has artistic appeal to me. So I’ve been busily walking the narrow streets and alleys looking for these gems. You will see a lot of them in my postings on our Lisbon trip. I’ll put them under my ongoing series titled Social Media. While not the electronic social media most commonly associated with that title, graffiti and posters are a more organic form of similar “postings” of miscellaneous information which when taken together as a whole paints an interesting crosscut of a part of modern culture.