Graphicswallah

Graphicswallah: Graphics in India by Keith Lovegrove looks at the Indian street art culture and the people behind it, ranging from shopkeepers to film hoarding painters to professional signwriters and creative advertising executives. This was an enjoyable read! It is so refreshing to see advertising that isn't all computer and digital. How advertising should be, I think! Although computer graphics isn't all that bad.

Some scans from the book. Took me a while because the book is kind of big and my scanner is just itty bitty tiny.

Looking at these street art also reminds me of  murals in Vietnam. I remember driving down a bustling street in Ho Chi Minh City and would see murals celebrating Vietnam as a communist country and how great communism is blah blah and also murals with praises for Ho Chi Minh. He is everywhere! But maybe it's the setting, but I feel like these kind of street art/advertising would be so strange to see in places like Canada, but they'd add so much to the environment, doesn't it? I think this sentence from the book describes what I would imagine being in India would feel like: 

"Salt, grapes, mangoes and beans are all arranged in a neat pyramidal mounds. Alongside the fruit and vegetable sellers, others trade in a disparate range of commodities, from plastic rope and bottle tops to quarter-sections of spokeless bicycle wheel rims. The road-level vendors don't require advertising assistance: everything is there for shoppers to see; they either want it or they don't"

- Jen