The mosaic of imagery in this exhibition must be viewed as a visual miracle of the collective unconscious. The four photographers herein pay homage to anonymous imagemakers and their freehanded public gestures with graceful and precise photographic depictions of random shapes, colors and tones left by unknown hands.

Looking back at the evolution of artistic graffiti, from early humans' symbolic search to find themselves to the most contemporary attempts to redefine humanity through discourse and creative production, we discover a mysterious unity in these disparate messages. The works of these four photographers are inventive equations of this expressive evolution. A metaphoric narrative has developed between these bodies of work spanning history, a correspondence that has grown out of the constant flow of apparent randomness in the many forms and representations made by the makers of the original marks and their photographic commentators. The process resembles the undeniable puzzle of creation, which makes oneness out of great diversity and produces energy out of the tension between opposites—and which continually dreams itself forward.

In their quasi-abstract or formalist ways, all four photographers are documenters of the evidence of the human struggle for identity in a given cultural space and time. Siskind, Mancini, Price and Robinson all are concerned with how public mark makers have expressed their yearning for spiritual connection with a greater force. The four photographers comment on the existential condition of their time by reinterpreting the physical traces—the painted and etched ephemera—of others' dreams. Although the intentions of the original mark makers were undoubtedly different from those of their present-day commentators, they share a common need to leave notations of their passing, of having negotiated the improbabilities, fears, and harms of life. They share the compulsion to leave physical evidence of their successful transactions.

The emblematic forms documented by the exhibition's photographers relieve the collective psyche of the culture they address. They are like safety valves on our dreams that render harmless abstract power and institutional authority. The four artists further complicate and randomize the markings by paying close attention to composition, framing and re-representation in their photographs. Paradoxically, the artists give these anonymous tracings a new, archetypal status through a process of conscious photographic mutation. In Jungian terms, these photographs express the pyschic residue of innumerable similar experiences; they present a picture of the seething expressive need of the public will.

"Ideas are where you find them, even on the walls of hell."

It is perhaps fitting that my discussion of the individual photographers begins with Aaron Siskind, the senior artist of the group. Siskind's work predates that of the other photographers in the exhibition. Perhaps one must start with him, because it was Siskind who cut the path through new aesthetic territory by focusing his camera on non-subjects, on visual detritus—paint splashs, dripples and swaths, rips, tears and cracks—in a purely expressionist way, masterfully abstracting the two-dimensional surface. We could also start with Siskind since his photographs are not only the most famous, but also because we must examine them and decipher their meaning before we can understand the departures of the younger imagemakers who followed him.

In his images, Siskind depicts random marks left on walls from Chicago to Lima. He delights in the way the camera transforms these fragments into tonal tensions that harmonize into a new form—the abstract photograph. Siskind is not interested in the specific political or social reason that the mark was left but in the magic that he can make of the forms that remain. (Note the images herein where the mark is one of eradication.) What is important to Siskind is his psyche. He wants his audience to understand that he is using the camera to reconfigure each paint drop or torn poster into a Siskind archetype. Siskind elevates the significance of these fragments by manipulating tone, scale, and position. He allows his audience to experience the tracings, reborn as powerful cultural signs, without prejudicing them with his own values. We are free to engage form as an experience in and of itself, one with its own intrinsic meaning.

Oddly enough, Siskind has given witness not to the meaning of the man-made mark but to the life-giving energy of the expressive act itself. He imbues the mundane with vitality through idiosyncratic yet deliberate creative action. It is no accident that the Siskind autograph can be witnessed in so many diverse locales. His work is irrefutable proof of the universality of the human need for self-expression.

"Graffiti is a sacrament to the Gods in a godless world."

In his preoccupation with 2000 year old Native American rock art, Salvatore Mancini uses his camera in an archaeological manner to present documents of the ciphers of a lost culture's immortality. Like his mentor Siskind, Mancini deliberately attempts to isolate forms, a modernist strategy that directs the viewer to a simple appreciation of the gestural beauty of the petroglyph. Mancini's photographs may be compared to the Siskind ¦uvre because they finesse the tonal scale of the black and white print where forms float ethereally in a compressed spatial realm. (Note image #4.) Mancini emphasizes formal aspects of the Ute petroglyphs by manipulating image contrast in printing. He further dramatizes his subject with electronic flash, creating magical, figurative forms artificially illuminated against dark, moody backgrounds. (Note image #15.) However, if Siskind is engaged in discovering his own psychic energy through the abstract rendering of the anonymous mark, Mancini strives to conduct the viewer through the photographer's visual exploration of the significance of the petroglyphs. Mancini seems to be saying I have noted the spiritual markings of an ancient culture and, having been moved by them, want you to share in my satori.

Mancini, an artist, not archaeologist, creates his images by juxtaposing Indian markings with features of the natural landscape. By using a cloud formation, a silhouetted cactus, or a half-illuminated horizon, he inscribes his comments on the Anasazi Indians' proto-graffiti. In his photographs, Mancini implies a connection between the meaning of the forms and their environment. The images seen here are symbolic of a simpler schematic of the world. Contemplation of these objects allows entry into a mystical space. "I view the drawings as records of past lives. In photographing, I enter into communion with those ancient inscribers." As Mancini states, he seeks to identify with his subject by rendering the "ancient inscribers" works with light and shadow to create a new representation.

Salvatore Mancini is not concerned with present-day discourse but with the tradition of transcendental thought. He wants us to know the purity of the Anasazi Indians, who sought to understand their existence on earth by constructing representational forms that animated both the sacred and the mundane. In the face of bewildering and uncontrollable nature, the Anasazi established a channel of communication with their gods through their pictographs. The Mancini photographs, through their own sublime simplicity, speak to the enduring power of that network.

"The lasting epigram is the one that changes"

New Wave urban graffiti of Soho, New York's art district, is another phase in the evolution of public mark-making, and has an ephemeral coexistence in its environment ­ the street. David Robinson beautifully illustrates work by today's anonymous artists in a manner very different from Mancini in his petroglyph photographs. Contemporary graffiti writers willingly subject their personal often whimsical markings to a continuous process of change in their struggle to communicate with an unknown and uncontrolled audience. Their outdoor galleries invite viewer reaction; the public forum creates a democratized art that is inherently interactive. The changes wrought upon a poster by another person are the essence of Robinson's concerns. He has consciously attempted to document and legitimize a contemporary art movement, one that reflects the culture in which it exists and has no permanence.

The mutation of the subject matter in his (and the other photographers') work clearly shows the energy of the exchange that unbounded expression allows. The essential Robinson photograph (like Soho W. 85 and Soho R and B 11), reveals an archetypal figure searching for a collective, alternative voice by intervening in conventional art culture. Not ironically, since his subject, graffiti, so clearly manifests self-conscious aspirations to art (and often incorporates "art world references"), Robinson acts upon it in a similar way. Each artist's graffito has a temporal existence that is co-opted by every passing eye, undermining the authority of the original artist. In Robinson's images, we see that the individualistic process of artmaking is humbled in contrast to Mancini's photographs, where the indelible dignity of the southwestern rock art is preserved by the dry climate and isolated setting. If Mancini's photographs speak of the enduring simplicity of our bond with nature, Robinson's address the innate human ability to adapt the creative impulse to a fractured culture. It is fitting that Robinson works with the exaggerated tonal values of Cibachrome and dramatic, graphic overlays to comment on the status-seeing and media co-optation of the graffiti artist.

The debris washes up, then washes away in a transmuted, often more clarified form. Finally, at some undetermined point, the objects have deteriorated to such a degree that they lose their buoyancy. Like the Soho posters in Robinson's photographs that are mutilated and transfigured, vulnerable to the eager hands of aspiring, egocentric auteurs; they clear room on the public canvas for their newest creations.

"No barrier is as great as our own inhibiting notion that we can't talk back."

This same post-structuralist idea leads us to an interpretation of Leland Rice's photographs that is embedded in the destruction of the Berlin Wall. A similar collectivity of creative, free minds that produced an infinite body of public expressive work, rendered that once impenetrable, blank slab of oppression into the apotheosis of democratic expression. It became a surface for unfettered creative hands to create and display, completely uncensored, their yearnings, aspirations, and frustrations. In our time, almost no authoritarian structure has been able to check the ubiquitous channels of communication that manifest the zeitgeist. The Wall was such a channel, and, metaphorically, it tumbled down under the weight of the individual acts of creative expression that coalesced on its surface.

Today, the Berlin Wall's shattered bits, mementos of liberty's quest, are preserved as desktop ornaments. Leland Rice's photographs, however, preserve the message of the Wall itself. It is a testament to Rice's will that he has managed to capture the Wall's message. Rice has left us documents of the Wall for future interpretation. His are vague references, not to the actual concrete barrier itself, nor to a specific political idea, but to the beauty of the Wall's eradication and the necessity of its destruction.

Rice's photographs are dense and convoluted. Gestures intersect in his images where one artist has impulsively intervened on the previously dominant markings made by an earlier "writer". Rice too has richly appropriated material from pop culture and rendered it photographically to create his own political dialogue. (The viewer should note this strategy in image #2 Détente or image #12 Tic Tac Geist. Not only are letters represented graphically in these images, but words are used narratively and poetically to convey meaning. This technique sets Rice apart from the three other photographers.) Rice establishes a new authoritative structure in his images. Rice, like Siskind, Mancini and Robinson, create surfaces in silver that testify to the uniqueness of the photograph and the individuality and originality of the artist.

No comment can be made about the enduring power of these Berlin pictographs without also discussing the power of the individual psyche to create new representations. This is the irony of expressive need: instead of the destruction of the Berlin Wall, we witness the indomitable presence of Rice's mural; or, in the case of David Robinson, we see a stylistic preoccupation with iconography through the techniques he employs, the reframing and isolating of the figurative form from its banal context. (Note Soho W #21.) Likewise, Mancini's eloquent use of illumination and juxtaposition sways us to his view that these otherwise inscrutable petroglyphs have celestial implications (Note image #5.) Aaron Siskind deals with proprietary concerns by reformulating or systematically obliterating expressive markings and sealing them in the surface of his photographs. (Note images #1 and #20.) Siskind's re-seeing inevitably leads us to the realization that the sign's authority is always in question. It represents only a transmutable idea acted on by the individual ego.

These photographs, particularly those by Robinson and Rice, must be read intertextually. Elements from one mark making must be examined in order to interpret or assign meaning to another making in the frame. Each is a comment on the other, a postmodern yet archetypal structure in which the comment on the subject carries as much authority as the original mark-making gesture. In Siskind's and Mancini's work, the authenticity of the original gesture is transformed completely into another order of experience. Meaning exists in the space between the individual photographs and their collectivity. They form their own wall of communication, allowing each of us to satisfy our own need for expression through the image.

Fundamentally, my reasons for bringing these four fine photographers together were to explore the dialectic that exists between color and black and white imagery, to engage issues of the preservation and dissolution of form, as well as appropriation and authenticity. The viewer must not forget the historical relationships between these bodies of work. We have less access to Rice's images if we do not understand Siskind's imagery. Nor can we fully appreciate the metaphoric meaning of the figures in Robinson's photographs or the heavenly allusions in Mancini's work without prior knowledge of the symbolic language they employ. The relationships are intrinsically intertwined. The viewer must be positioned in a metaphorical space between the photographer and the subject, the space between comment and commentary defined by the condition of our times, where an image is neither in the cultural sphere (the life of the street) or in the institutional sphere (the self-conscious world of art), but, rather, in a tensely renegotiated space between the two.

"Authority ought to be taken for granted because it usually is so insignificant"*

Inevitably, we will mutilate these photographic images in our own mind's eye. If I was not so conditioned by the institutions of the Catalogue and the Exhibition, I would mark on these surfaces myself. I must be content with appropriating the ways of seeing expressed in the images and incorporating them into my own experience. The message of the photographer is in dreaming the dialogue forward.

*All quotes are from Talking to Myself by Carlo Uva. Manda Press, 1990.