"&" (2011)
It was my last day in Dublin, and I was walking the streets with my travel companions. We had just finished up at the National Photographic Archive, looking at their latest exhibit on childhood in Ireland from the late 1800′s to the early 1900′s. As we dodged and wove between streets, we saw a tremendous amount of graffiti lining the alleyways. Most all of the graffiti is very well done, beautiful in fact. But there was one style that appealed to me more than any other, Maser’s. He’s got work all over the city, especially in Smithfield, where I was staying. But walking through Temple Bar, I found a well known piece of his from the “They are Us” exhibit that he did in 2010. The piece reads, “I’d rather trust a dealer on a badly lit street corner, than a criminal in a three piece suit.”
After stopping to admire his work for a moment I continued down the alley. As I rounded the corner, I found another piece, one more rare and less seen that reads, “Greed is the knife, and the scars run deep.” The message was intriguing, but I was really interested in the aesthetic that Maser used, particularly on the ampersand. I still enjoy this images, without the entirety of the piece. Actually, it’s the screen saver on my phone at the moment.
