After spending a good bit of time in Brasil, Ive noticed that in most cities, namely Rio de Janeiro, street art, whether it be graffiti, wheat pasting, stenciling or another form is thought of and subsequently dealt with a lot differently than it is here in Houston. Of course this differential may be a lot less apparent if you live in a more concentrated and older metropolitan area such as New York or Baltimore, but Ive lived in Baltimore and visited New York several times and the difference is apparent.

Around every corner, whether it is in the expensive suburbs of Barra or in the doldrums of Centro, you are bound to stumble across something interesting, but for every colorful, detailed piece there are hundreds of base tags thrown up randomly. The walls covered with the inane scribblings of the juvenile underbelly of Rio only deter for seconds as they are usually replaced by huge murals that make traffic somewhat bearable and sometimes pleasing.

As I walked around Rio most recently, I made it a point to try and make a photo of most of the instances of street art that I came across. There are pastings, traditional graffiti (in several styles), murals, and just plain old interesting walls. The overall diversity of styles in street art that you see on a casual walk around Rio is incredible. Regardless if you see some forms of street art as vandalism or criminal in nature, it’s all art, and for that I give it my respect.

I wish, when I walked (or drove) around certain parts of Houston, that Id be greeted with a nice, big, mural of something as colorful and whimsical as what I saw in Brasil.

…or maybe it’s just jet lag. I haven’t blogged in more than a few days, mainly due to the fact that I haven’t really been shooting much save the lot of cheesy family snapshots with my new Canon G9. I had been meaning to buy a smaller Canon compact camera for some time and the G9 was the perfect (partial) Christmas present to myself. While it may not be as compact as the smaller SD series, it has a lot of familiar control features that allow myself not to be alienated every time I pick it up. I have also been meaning to really start to teach myself video capture and production and it seems I’m using the G9 for mostly its video capture capabilities of late. It shoots with excellent video quality for such a tiny camera. I put a short piece together while on a 12 hour plane ride from Houston to Rio de Janeiro earlier today. I am here visiting my parents who live in Brazil. My goal is to be more proficient behind a camera capturing video frames as well as Final Cut, however this piece was put together entirely in iMovie. Rio is a plethora of photo opportunities so expect more frequent updates for the next two weeks.

Here is a very nice comment I received when I originally posted this on my older blog. Received from “moto” on January 20th, 2008:

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“That little film was absolutely and amazingly good. Very impressive. Can’t wait to see more of your work, (play?)”