240 pages
Hardcover
11'' x 11'' (280 x 280 mm)
black & white photographs throughout
English

my first contact with bombing was at the age of eleven. it was 1987, tagging your ?ka?around your city was a trend and i was part of. as a kid, such phases can come and go quickly, it didn? take more than a bit of trouble at school before my friends and i occupied ourselves with other interests. then, in the early 90s, graffiti culture captured me again and i learned to write my name using caps and cans as well as markers. in the years that followed, bombing became the most important thing in my life. at school i practiced on paper. at night i? sneak out three or four times a week to get up as my parents lay sleeping. i started to fall asleep during my lessons, my grades dropped, and i had never felt like i was learning more.
since my missions were secret, getting the money for paint was also a mystery. i began buying up 2nd quality cans, supplying the guys around me and using the profit to pay for my own paint. i started selling spray paint in 1993, and didn? stay dealing on the corner for long. at first it was a huge hustle, borrowing a car, driving a good 20km to the factory and spending hours searching palettes, checking cans and looking for those that would work for our needs. as a rule, a palette of about 700 cans won? have more than five dozen useable ones left on it.
in 1996, one of my former schoolmates and i turned this practice into a business and today that company is part of a group, which is europe? largest spray paint manufacturer. it? amazing to know that we supply over 75 countries around the world, and are still able to focus on our core clients, developing new lines of paint intended for the artists we knew would use it.
the activities documented in this book include just a fraction of our customers and bits of my personal glimpse into graffiti culture. back in 1987, the modern graffiti explosion had already had its first peek. look around your city and you?l surely see traces of this culture, some of them loud, some of them violent, some of them lovely. but it isn? just the trains and the walls anymore, graffiti entered the fine art world and it? not unusual to see pieces trading at tens and even hundreds of thousands of euros.
around 1997, i was so swamped running the business that i could no longer feel serious about my own writing and i decided to focus on the company. at this point, the role of the photograph in graffiti continued to intrigue me and eventually this was the language i would learn to write with. in 2001 i met a graffiti writer who had also emerged as an excellent photographer (alex fakso) as he shot the bombs going off in milan every night. wary of ?iting?his style, i forced myself to consider frames where the artist was absent. at first i focused on trainyards, a series that brought me back to these fascinating places, but eventually i started over like a kid again, following my heart through the culture of what had formerly influenced my life so
heavily: writing and bombing.
finding the right style for a series sometimes takes time and over the years i have progressively tried to bring forward and preserve the feelings that fueled myself and a non-aligned army of writers to go out and hit the trains, everyday, everywhere. each time i shot this process, i had a flashback to different moments in my life and this is where the book begins. first with the local feeling/personal flashback and then with an effort to demonstrate the shared similarities in this sensation that break all sorts of cultural lines; my aim was for writers to recognize their lives in each shot and to preserve and portray this feeling for myself.

ruedione, Heidelberg Germany