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Book Description
If you’ve ever used a public restroom, chances are you’ve read some bathroom graffiti, or at least noticed it. Often bawdy, funny and smart, sometimes illegible, it is a ubiquitous means of expression found across the United States and all over the world. Do the private, intimate moments in the bathroom provide people the opportunity to freely express themselves, leaving little nuggets of truth and insight for the next user? If you ask Mark Ferem, the answer is yes. Ferem has spent the past several years collecting and compiling photographs of exceptional bathroom graffiti, making for the perfect bathroom book. Divided up into thematic sections like "Men’s Rooms," "Women’s Rooms," "Art" and "Politics," unlike other graffiti books, the examples in Bathroom Graffiti are not so much about graffiti as an art form as much as they are about graffiti as the result of personal expression, which will never find its way into galleries or ad campaigns.
Latrinalia: Learning More About Our Private Selves, January 26, 2007
Mark Ferem is onto a strong concept. For several years he has been photographing and writing about the graffiti found in restrooms across America, Mexico, and Canada, finding that these tiny repositories of space isolate potential writers, giving them momentary privacy to pen their thoughts and perceptions and flailings and political strider and sexual leanings. The result of this preoccupation is a book that is not only a well designed photography survey of latrines ('latrinalia') but it is also a sensitive study of the needs of those who elect to decorate the walls during those private moments of waiting for nature to take its course.
Amir H. Fallah introduces the book with an essay in which lines such as these arise: 'Usually the scrawls and doodles in the bathrooms don't reveal anything profound or life altering. They are simply messages and images written and drawn anonymously in the safety of the bathroom stall'...'They capture moments in time where individuals left their marks for the rest of us to see, binding us all together by the simple fact that we all have to go to the bathroom.'
Ferem then introduces his project with some personal wisdom as to why people write what they write and then proceeds to divide his book into sections: Introduction (The Wall) 'Latrinalists believe that there is no ascension without dissension'; Men's Room 'If Pro is Progress, what is Con?'; Women's Room; Uni-Sex; Politikal Asylum (sic); Apokalupsis Now (sic); and Random Firing Neurons. Of course each of these chapters are groundings for some superb photographs, taken in all manner of light and from angles that would challenge the finest fine art photographer. Close-ups of lines of wisdom or folly, images of very well drawn graffiti, and color-smeared filthy walls that bespeak of layer upon layer of thoughts and emotional outlets - all provide laughs and thoughts and serve as a nidus for philosophizing.
In the end Mark Ferem invites us all to add to his ongoing project of latrinalia. 'Bathroom graffiti elevates the common moment and its intention...The spirit of latrinalia may not be in the words and images but in the consciousness in which it is written.' It makes for an intriguing book, a photographic odyssey that is produced and designed in the highest quality as an art book. And it makes us curious...Grady Harp, January 07
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The book is divided to six sections..., May 22, 2007
... Men's room, women's room, uni-sex bathrooms, political messages, religious-like messages and just some examples the author finds significant in such art form. The book is quite well organized with arguments that come in a short essay at the beginning of each section that the photographs follow.
I like the author's sensibility to women's literary creativity from the part where he chose and examined a number of examples that demonstrate some very interesting feminine experience we normally do not hear but anonymously. They are about negative experience and difficulties of women. It's almost forbidden to voice out how weak one feels sometimes because Americanism is a lot of the time about suppressing the reality of weakness and despise whoever that're suffering, ironically, if one is a woman. But when nobody is watching, at least, at that very moment of writing the graffiti, the truth is revealed and the emotions are very genuine. Just from the phenomenon of such feminine writing we can identify how discriminatory our culture is against women that seek a medium to put their negative experience in words. That is a good section.
I also like the author's viewpoint on "dialogue" here and there throughout
the entire book. It's so true that by reading what other people write
in the bathrooms, we not only see what has been said anonymously once
in time, but also a continuous exchange of private experience with
the other unknown people, making the act of graffiti itself interrelated
among the writers and readers. The idea of dialogue certainly challenges
us to evaluate how effective the more addressed communications outside
of the bathrooms in our daily lives actually are.
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Bathroom Graffiti Rocks, March 31, 2007
Mark Ferem in this book documents all those bathroom bits of wisdom and insanity that you've never wanted to forget. It's as insightful as it is entertaining. great bathroom reading.
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