SprayStreet.com

About

Spray Street is a project by Brett Webb. I've been writing graffiti since 1988 and documenting it on the web since 1994. This site is where I keep the work I'm still doing: the Photo Archive, the events listing, a couple of games, and a directory of graffiti shops. No algorithm, no feed, just stuff I think is worth keeping around.

Art Crimes (1994–2005)

Susan Farrell started Art Crimes in May 1994 with a handful of photos from Atlanta and Prague, the first website dedicated to graffiti. I joined that September as a photographer while I was a student at USC, and ended up helping out in lots of different ways for the next eleven years. Susan ran the show; I just tried to be useful. The full story is on the Art Crimes site.

A lot of what I do here started there. The events section, the train-painting projects, the photo galleries: Spray Street is in many ways my attempt to keep that work going on my own terms.

The Photo Archive

The Photo Archive is where I post and browse the collection day to day, on the web at app.spraystreet.com. I built it because I'm tired of corporate photo apps deciding what graffiti gets seen. There's no algorithm. Posts show up in the order they were posted and stay there, they don't get buried or pushed to the top based on likes and comments. If you write or shoot graffiti, it's just a place to post your photos and see everyone else's, without an app deciding what you get to see.

The mobile app

The Photo Archive is also on iOS and Android as a native app, same no-algorithm approach, just from your phone. There's more on what it does if you want the full rundown.

Events

For years there was an events section on Art Crimes. Susan did the heavy lifting tracking jams and meetings and making sure people knew where to be. That version isn't around anywhere anymore, so I started a new one here. Same idea: if there's a jam, paint meet, or show coming up, I want it to be findable.

Train painting (online)

The first online train-painting toy I worked on was a Java applet on Art Crimes back in the 90s. I honestly can't remember what it was based on now. Then in 2002 I made In:Graffiti for the Bronx Museum with Flat Design on the visuals and Steven Warren doing the Flash development. It lived on the Bronx Museum site from 2002 to 2005 and ended up as a site-specific installation at "Yes, Yes, Y'All" at Hospital Gallery in London.

The current iteration is Benching, still in beta, same lineage, new tech.

30 Days

30 Days is an old-school text-based game where you spend a month racking paint, putting up a crew, and getting up. I made it as an early experiment with vibe coding. I wanted to see how far I could push that workflow on something that wasn't trivial. It came out a fun little time-waster.

Behind the archive

Behind all of this is a back-end ingestion tool I'm building to take large sets of photos (decades of them, in my case) and push them into the cloud in an organized way. The galleries on this site and the feed in the Photo Archive come out of that pipeline. The goal is for the archive to outlast me.

Get in touch

• Contact form (on the store)
• Instagram